Late Tuesday, President Trump announced on social media that he had convinced Coca-Cola to agree to use "REAL Cane Sugar" in Coke, in lieu of the current, cheaper sweetener used in the US version of the drink: high-fructose corn syrup.
"I'd like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola. This will be a very good move by them—You’ll see. It's just better!" Trump wrote.
On Wednesday, Coca-Cola failed to confirm that supposed agreement. On its website, the beverage giant posted a brief, vague statement saying "We appreciate President Trump’s enthusiasm for our iconic Coca‑Cola brand" and that "More details on new innovative offerings" will be announced soon.
Logophiles are "devastated" after Dictionary.com deleted their logs of favorited words that they carefully crafted for years. The company deleted all accounts, as well as the only ways to use Dictionary.com without seeing ads —even if you previously paid for an ad-free experience.
Dictionary.com offers a free dictionary through its website and free Android and iOS apps. It used to offer paid-for mobile apps, called Dictionary.com Pro, that let users set up accounts, use the app without ads, and enabled other features (like grammar tips and science and rhyming dictionaries) that are gone now. Dictionary.com's premium apps also let people download an offline dictionary (its free apps used to let you buy a downloadable dictionary as a one-time purchase), but offline the dictionaries aren't available anymore.
Accounts axed abruptly
About a year ago, claims of Dictionary.com’s apps being buggy surfaced online. We also found at least one person claiming that they were unable to buy an ad-free upgrade at that time.
Researchers from Cisco’s Talos security team have uncovered a malware-as-a-service operator that used public GitHub accounts as a channel for distributing an assortment of malicious software to targets.
The use of GitHub gave the malware-as-a-service (MaaS) a reliable and easy-to-use platform that’s greenlit in many enterprise networks that rely on the code repository for the software they develop. GitHub removed the three accounts that hosted the malicious payloads shortly after being notified by Talos.
“In addition to being an easy means of file hosting, downloading files from a GitHub repository may bypass Web filtering that is not configured to block the GitHub domain,” Talos researchers Chris Neal and Craig Jackson wrote Thursday. “While some organizations can block GitHub in their environment to curb the use of open-source offensive tooling and other malware, many organizations with software development teams require GitHub access in some capacity. In these environments, a malicious GitHub download may be difficult to differentiate from regular web traffic.”
If you're the owner of an Android phone and live in a seismically active region, there's a chance your phone has popped up an unusual warning. Not one that asks for permission to share personal information, or potential malware, but something far more serious: There's an earthquake nearby, and you have up to a minute or two to get to a safer location.
Starting in the US in 2020 and expanding internationally since, the system is called Android Earthquake Alert (AEA), and it's on by default in most Android phones. And today, Google has a paper in Science that describes how the system works, how the company has improved it, and what it has seen during the first few years of operation, including what caused a handful of false alarms.
Shaking things up
Smartphones come with accelerometers, small devices that enable them to sense changes in motion. This is how they manage to do tricks like figuring out how many steps you're walking. If your phone is sitting quietly on a table, however, the accelerometer shouldn't be registering much significant motion. But anything from you walking across the room to a truck going by outside can cause vibrations that your phone's accelerometer can pick up. As can the often less subtle vibrations of earthquakes.
Last year, Medicare spent over $10 billion on dubious bandages—called skin substitutes—that come with eye-popping prices. Some are made from medical waste, like dried bits of discarded placentas or infant foreskin, and many have not gone through rigorous testing to prove they offer any advantage over standard bandages. Yet, in some cases, Medicare reportedly paid for bandages priced at more than $21,000 per square inch. And individual patients have quickly racked up bills over $1 million just for their bandaging—some who puzzlingly didn't even have a wound.
Private insurance companies largely do not cover these bandages, declaring many of them "unproven and not medically necessary." But Medicare's current coverage seems to tie back to a rule change in 2020 that opened the door to broader use of them—and the market for these dubious skin substitutes, often used for diabetic ulcers, exploded. Since 2023, more than 100 new products have been introduced, according to an investigative report from The New York Times in April.
The Times investigation highlighted two big reasons why they're so pricy: First, due to an oddity in pricing rules, Medicare initially sets the reimbursement rate for the bandages at whatever price the manufacturer chooses—for the first six months at least. The second is that doctors are granted steep discounts, incentivizing them to use the pricy products for bigger reimbursements. After the initial six-month period, Medicare reimburses only what doctors pay after manufacturer discounts. However, some bandage makers get around this by just rolling out new products that are suspiciously similar to the old ones, maintaining the large reimbursement rates.
On Thursday, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Agent, a new feature that lets the company's AI assistant complete multi-step tasks by controlling its own web browser. The update merges capabilities from OpenAI's earlier Operator tool and the Deep Research feature, allowing ChatGPT to navigate websites, run code, and create documents while users maintain control over the process.
The feature marks OpenAI's latest entry into what the tech industry calls "agentic AI"—systems that can take autonomous multi-step actions on behalf of the user. OpenAI says users can ask Agent to handle requests like assembling and purchasing a clothing outfit for a particular occasion, creating PowerPoint slide decks, planning meals, or updating financial spreadsheets with new data.
The system uses a combination of web browsers, terminal access, and API connections to complete these tasks, including "ChatGPT Connectors" that integrate with apps like Gmail and GitHub.
Google is hosting its annual Pixel event on August 20, which will likely feature the Pixel 10 series and the Pixel Watch 4. The new Pixel phones are expected to retain the physical design of last year's phones, but a new report claims Google's smartwatch is getting an important hardware upgrade—it may finally be repairable.
Google has stuck with the same design for all three generations of the Pixel Watch, making changes only to internal components, displays, and charging. Even with the year-to-year design consistency, Google has neglected to make replacement parts available—not to consumers and not to repair shops. A report from Android Headlines claims that Google will make changes to the construction that will allow for repairs.
The Pixel Watch, Watch 2, and the current Watch 3 have the same sleek construction, featuring a curved glass cover that merges seamlessly with the aluminum housing. It looks great, but there's no easy way to disassemble it. Even if you manage to get inside, it's nigh impossible to find replacement parts. We don't yet know if the supposed redesign will make the Pixel Watch 4 look different, but the report claims it has been designed specifically with repairs in mind.
A former cop in the United Kingdom was sentenced to five and a half years in prison Wednesday after pleading guilty to covering up his theft of 50 bitcoins seized during an investigation into the now-defunct illicit dark web marketplace Silk Road.
In 2014, the former UK National Crime Agency (NCA) officer, Paul Chowles, assisted in the arrest of Thomas White, a man "who had launched Silk Road 2.0 less than a month after the FBI had shut down the original site in 2013," the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said in a press release.
Chowles was tapped to analyze and extract "relevant data and cryptocurrency" from White's seized devices, specifically due to Chowles' reputation for being "technically minded and very aware of the dark web and cryptocurrencies," CPS said.
Karl Urban takes a break from The Boys to play a washed-up Johnny Cage in the trailer for Mortal Kombat II, a sequel to 2021's Mortal Kombat reboot and the fourth live-action film in the franchise based on the 1990s video game series. It comes one day after Warner Bros. released a (very entertaining) fake trailer for a new in-universe, faux 1990s Johnny Cage movie, Uncaged Fury. (Cage's prior fake film credits apparently include Cool Hand Cage, Hard to Cage, and Rebel Without a Cage.)
The first live-action Mortal Kombat film turns 30 this year. It was a box office success but a critical failure, although it has since evolved into a campy cult classic—and Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa is still considered by many to be the definitive portrayal of sorcerer Shang Tsung. A 1997 sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, however, bombed both critically and financially. And Midway, the game publisher, filed for bankruptcy soon after.
However, Warner Bros. bought the rights and eventually tapped Simon McQuoid to direct a reboot more than 20 years after the original's release, focusing on MMA fighter Cole Young (Lewis Tan). The 2021 film earned mixed reviews, but performed sufficiently well at the box office for Warner Bros. to green-light a sequel, also directed by McQuoid. The 2021 film ended with Cole heading to Los Angeles to look for martial arts movie star Johnny Cage, who is the main protagonist of Mortal Kombat II.
The premiere of Alien: Earth is just weeks away, and FX/Hulu dropped one last trailer to pique our interest, along with a much more detailed synopsis. It's meditative and existential in tone, with a haunting tune playing over footage of mysterious alien craft, dead bodies, blood-spattered humans fleeing through futuristic corridors, and, of course, a spooky silhouette of a xenomorph in the distance.
As previously reported, the eight-episode series is set in 2120, two years before the events of the first film, Alien (1979), in a world where corporate interests are competing to unlock the key to human longevity—maybe even immortality. Showrunner Noah Hawley has said that the style and mythology will be closer to that film than Prometheus (2012) or Alien: Covenant, both of which were also prequels.
The US Senate voted to rescind two years' worth of funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), delivering a blow to public radio and television stations around the country. The CPB is a publicly funded nonprofit corporation that supports NPR and PBS stations.
The 51-48 vote today on President Trump's rescissions package would eliminate $1.1 billion that was allocated to public broadcasting for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. All 51 yes votes came from Republicans, while Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) voted against. The $1.1 billion includes $60 million for "costs associated with replacing and upgrading the public broadcasting interconnection system" and other back-end infrastructure for public media.
"Without federal funding, many local public radio and television stations will be forced to shut down. Parents will have fewer high quality learning resources available for their children," CPB CEO Patricia Harrison said. "Millions of Americans will have less trustworthy information about their communities, states, country, and world with which to make decisions about the quality of their lives. Cutting federal funding could also put Americans at risk of losing national and local emergency alerts that serve as a lifeline to many Americans in times of severe need."
How many Google AI researchers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A recent research paper detailing the technical core behind Google's Gemini AI assistant may suggest an answer, listing an eye-popping 3,295 authors.
It's a number that recently caught the attention of machine learning researcher David Ha (known as "hardmaru" online), who revealed on X that the first 43 names also contain a hidden message. "There’s a secret code if you observe the authors’ first initials in the order of authorship," Ha wrote, relaying the Easter egg: "GEMINI MODELS CAN THINK AND GET BACK TO YOU IN A FLASH."
The paper, titled "Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities," describes Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash AI models, which were released in March. These large language models, which power Google's chatbot AI assistant, feature simulated reasoning capabilities that produce a string of "thinking out loud" text before generating responses in an attempt to help them solve more difficult problems. That explains "think" and "flash" in the hidden text.
It's widely accepted conventional wisdom that when it comes to creative works—TV shows, films, music, books—consumers crave an optimal balance between novelty and familiarity. What we choose to consume and share with others, in turn, drives cultural evolution.
But what if that conventional wisdom is wrong? An analysis based on data from a massive online fan fiction (fanfic) archive contradicts this so-called "balance theory," according to a paper published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. The fanfic community seems to overwhelmingly prefer more of the same, consistently choosing familiarity over novelty; however, they reported greater overall enjoyment when they took a chance and read something more novel. In short: "Sameness entices, but novelty enchants."
Strictly speaking, authors have always copied characters and plots from other works (cf. many of William Shakespeare's plays), although the advent of copyright law complicated matters. Modern fan fiction as we currently think of it arguably emerged with the 1967 publication of the first Star Trek fanzine (Spockanalia), which included spinoff fiction based on the series. Star Trek also spawned the subgenre of slash fiction, when writers began creating stories featuring Kirk and Spock (Kirk/Spock, or K/S) in a romantic (often sexual) relationship.
Delta has become the first airline to announce that it is using AI to boost profits by personalizing pricing through a pilot program that for months has caused customers to pay different prices for the same flights based on their data profile.
Critics have warned that this use of AI goes beyond airline practices that charge people who book flights ahead less than people who book flights at the last minute—and could ultimately mean the end of cheap flights across the board if other airlines follow.
On an earnings call last week, Delta Air Lines President Glen William Hauenstein confirmed that seats on about 3 percent of domestic flights were sold using the AI pricing system over the past six months. By the end of the year, Delta's goal is to boost that to 20 percent of tickets.
Automakers selling cars in the United States now have even less incentive to care about fuel economy. As Ars has noted before, the current administration and its Republican allies in Congress have been working hard to undermine federal regulations meant to make our vehicle fleet more efficient.
Some measures have been aimed at decreasing adoption of electric vehicles—for example the IRS clean vehicle tax credit will be eliminated at the end of September. Others have targeted federal fuel economy regulations that require automakers to meet specific fleet efficiency averages or face punishing fines for polluting too much. At least, they used to.
According to a letter seen by Reuters, sent to automakers by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal government has decided it will not levy any fines on companies that have exceeded the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) limits dating back to model year 2022.
The European Commission has stalled one of its investigations into Elon Musk’s X for breaking the bloc’s digital transparency rules, while it seeks to conclude trade talks with the US.
Brussels was expected to finalise its probe into the social media platform before the EU’s summer recess but will miss this deadline, according to three officials familiar with the matter. They noted that a decision was likely to follow after clarity emerged in the EU-US trade negotiations. “It’s all tied up,” one of the officials added.
The EU has several investigations into X under the bloc’s Digital Services Act, a set of rules for large online players to police their platforms more aggressively.
For the 2025 model year, Aston Martin's user interface took a major step forward across the lineup, with improvements to the physical controls and digital infotainment, as well as updated gauge cluster layouts. However, the big news dropped in the spring, when Aston and Apple announced the launch of CarPlay Ultra, the next generation of Apple's nearly ubiquitous automotive operating system.
Ultra extends beyond the strictly “phone” functions of traditional CarPlay to now encompass more robust vehicular integration, including climate control, drive modes, and the entire gauge cluster readout. Running Ultra, therefore, requires a digital gauge cluster. So far, not many automakers other than Aston have signaled their intent to join the revolution: Kia/Hyundai/Genesis will adopt Ultra next, and Porsche may come after that.
Before future partnerships come to fruition, I spent a week with a DB12 Volante to test Ultra's use cases and conceptual failure points, most critically to discover whether this generational leap actually enhances or detracts from an otherwise stellar driving experience.
Broadcom is kicking some cloud service providers (CSPs) out of the VMware channel partner program, bringing uncertainty for the technological and financial futures of numerous businesses, especially small-to-medium-sized ones.
As reported by The Register today, Broadcom this week revealed to VMware CSP partners that it is launching a new invite-only channel program for CSPs on November 1. Fewer CSPs are expected to be eligible for this new program. The Register said that “some mid-size partners won’t be invited to the new program."
Current VMware CSPs that didn’t receive an invite for the new program by today have reportedly been cut and will receive a notice of non-renewal.
The Mercedes-Benz CLA is a marked departure from Mercedes' EV efforts. Instead of a dedicated line of EQ vehicles—like the EQB, EQC, and EQS—we're getting vehicles "with EQ Technology." It started with the electric G Wagon, but the CLA is the first mainstream product to make the change. The thing is that the change is significant and for the better. Several months ago, we got some time in a prototype CLA; now we've driven the final product.
The CLA returns for the 2026 model year as an EV first (with a hybrid coming) on an all-new 800-volt architecture. This architecture will find its way to other Mercedes vehicles, like the upcoming GLB and GLC. This thoroughly modern setup features some of the company's biggest innovations.
The CLA will be available with either one or two electric motors, with a two-speed setup for efficiency and performance. The 250+ base model makes 268 hp (200 kW) and 247 lb-ft (335 Nm) of torque. Mercedes is claiming up to 792 km of range with this model on the WLTP cycle. Accounting for WLTP's optimism, it's still possible we might see an EPA-rated range over 400 miles, but Mercedes isn't quoting any real numbers yet.
