After an app update rollout that can best be described as disastrous, Sonos is seeking a new CEO. The company announced today that Patrick Spence, who had been CEO for eight years, is stepping down.

In its announcement, Sonos said its board of directors and Spence "agreed" on the decision while saying it was unrelated to the company's fiscal Q1 2025 earnings, which it will report next month.

Spence joined Sonos as chief commercial officer in 2012 after leaving Blackberry. Under his tenure, Sonos branched into new categories, including portable speakers and spatial audio. But in May, Sonos issued an app update that broke basic and critical features. Sonos employees said the update was built on outdated code and infrastructure, impacting users' ability to do things like access and manage local libraries, set sleep timers, and edit song queues and playlists.

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On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to decide whether to block lawsuits that Honolulu filed to seek billions in damages from oil and gas companies over allegedly deceptive marketing campaigns that hid the effects of climate change.

Now those lawsuits can proceed, surely frustrating the fossil fuel industry, which felt that SCOTUS should have weighed in on this key "recurring question of extraordinary importance to the energy industry" raised in lawsuits seeking similarly high damages in several states, CBS News reported.

Defendants Sunoco and Shell, along with 15 other energy companies, had asked the court to intervene and stop the Hawaii lawsuits from proceeding. They had hoped to move the cases out of Hawaii state courts by arguing that interstate pollution is governed by federal law and the Clean Air Act.

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On Monday, the US government announced a new round of regulations on global AI chip exports, dividing the world into roughly three tiers of access. The rules create quotas for about 120 countries and allow unrestricted access for 18 close US allies while maintaining existing bans on China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

AI-accelerating GPU chips, like those manufactured by Nvidia, currently serve as the backbone for a wide variety of AI model deployments, such as chatbots like ChatGPT, AI video generators, self-driving cars, weapons targeting systems, and much more. The Biden administration fears that those chips could be used to undermine US national security.

According to the White House, "In the wrong hands, powerful AI systems have the potential to exacerbate significant national security risks, including by enabling the development of weapons of mass destruction, supporting powerful offensive cyber operations, and aiding human rights abuses."

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COCOA BEACH, Fla.—With 45 minutes left in a three-hour launch window, Blue Origin scrubbed its first attempt to launch the massive New Glenn rocket early on Monday morning.

Throughout the window, which opened at 1 am ET (06:00 UTC), the company continued to reset the countdown clock as launch engineers worked out technical issues with the rocket.

Officially, both on its live webcast as well as on social media following the scrub, Blue Origin was vague about the cause of the delayed launch attempt.

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MERRITT ISLAND, Fla.—Understandably, the main building of Blue Origin's sprawling campus in Florida buzzed with activity on Sunday evening as the final hours ticked down toward the company's historic first orbital launch. The time had come to celebrate a moment long-awaited.

On one side of the large foyer hung a multi-story print of the New Glenn rocket lit up on its launch pad. The striking image had been taken a day after Christmas and put up in the lobby two days earlier. On the other side, a massive replica of the company's "Mk. 1" lunar lander towered over caterers bustling through.

My escort and I took the elevators to the upper floor, where a walkway overlooks the factory where Blue Origin builds the first and second stages of its New Glenn rocket. There I met the chief executive of the company, Dave Limp, as well as the person responsible for all of this activity.

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Plenty of computer monitors made debuts at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this year, but many of the updates at this year's event were pretty minor. Many could have easily been a part of 2024's show.

But some brought new and interesting features to the table for 2025—in this article, we'll tell you all about them.

LG’s 6K monitor

Pixel addicts are always right at home at CES, and the most interesting high-resolution computer monitor to come out of this year's show is the LG UltraFine 6K Monitor (model 32U990A).

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A standard digital camera used in a car for stuff like emergency braking has a perceptual latency of a hair above 20 milliseconds. That’s just the time needed for a camera to transform the photons hitting its aperture into electrical charges using either CMOS or CCD sensors. It doesn’t count the further milliseconds needed to send that information to an onboard computer or process it there.

A team of MIT researchers figured that if you had a chip that could process photons directly, you could skip the entire digitization step and perform calculations with the photons themselves, which has the potential to be mind-bogglingly faster.

“We’re focused on a very specific metric here, which is latency. We aim for applications where what matters the most is how fast you can produce a solution. That’s why we are interested in systems where we’re able to do all the computations optically,” says Saumil Bandyopadhyay, an MIT researcher. The team implemented a complete deep neural network on a photonic chip, achieving a latency of 410 picoseconds. To put that in perspective, Bandyopadhyay’s chip could process the entire neural net it had onboard around 58 times within a single tick of the 4 GHz clock on a standard CPU.

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COCOA BEACH, Fla.—As it so often does in the final days before the debut of a new rocket, it all comes down to weather. Accordingly, Blue Origin is only awaiting clear skies and fair seas for its massive New Glenn vehicle to lift off from Florida.

After the company completed integration of the rocket this week and rolled the super heavy lift rocket to its launch site at Cape Canaveral, the focus turned toward the weather. Conditions at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base have been favorable during the early morning launch windows available to the rocket, but there have been complications offshore.

That's because Blue Origin aims to recover the first stage of the New Glenn rocket, and sea states in the Atlantic Ocean have been unsuitable for an initial attempt to catch the first stage booster on a drone ship. The company has already waived one launch attempt set for 1 am ET (06:00 UTC) on Friday, January 10.

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Every year, thousands of product vendors, journalists, and gadget enthusiasts gather in an unreasonable city to gawk at mostly unrealistic products.

To be of service to our readers, Ars has done the work of looking through hundreds of such items presented at the 2025 Consumer Electronic Show, pulling out the most bizarre, unnecessary, and head-scratching items. Andrew Cunningham swept across PC and gaming accessories. This writer stuck to goods related to the home.

It's a lie to say it's all a prank, so I snuck in a couple of actually good things announced during CES for human domiciles. But the stuff you'll want to tell your family and friends about in mock disbelief? Plenty of that, still.

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While worrying about AI takeover might seem like a modern idea that sprung from War Games or The Terminator, it turns out that a similar concern about machine dominance dates back to the time of the American Civil War, albeit from an English sheep farmer living in New Zealand. Theoretically, Abraham Lincoln could have read about AI takeover during his lifetime.

On June 13, 1863, a letter published in The Press newspaper of Christchurch warned about the potential dangers of mechanical evolution and called for the destruction of machines, foreshadowing the development of what we now call artificial intelligence—and the backlash against it from people who fear it may threaten humanity with extinction. It presented what may be the first published argument for stopping technological progress to prevent machines from dominating humanity.

Titled "Darwin among the Machines," the letter recently popped up again on social media thanks to Peter Wildeford of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy. The author of the letter, Samuel Butler, submitted it under the pseudonym Cellarius, but later came to publicly embrace his position. The letter drew direct parallels between Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the rapid development of machinery, suggesting that machines could evolve consciousness and eventually supplant humans as Earth's dominant species.

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In 2019, astronomer Britt Lundgren of the University of North Carolina Asheville visited the Guggenheim Museum in New York City to take in an exhibit of the works of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint. Lundgren noted a striking similarity between the abstract geometric shapes in af Klint's work and scientific diagrams in 19th century physicist Thomas Young's Lectures (1807). So began a four-year journey starting at the intersection of science and art that has culminated in a forthcoming paper in the journal Leonardo, making the case for the connection.

Af Klint was formally trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and initially focused on drawing, portraits, botanical drawings, and landscapes from her Stockholm studio after graduating with honors. This provided her with income, but her true life's work drew on af Klint's interest in spiritualism and mysticism. She was one of "The Five," a group of Swedish women artists who shared those interests. They regularly organized seances and were admirers of theosophical teachings of the time.

It was through her work with The Five that af Klint began experimenting with automatic drawing, driving her to invent her own geometric visual language to conceptualize the invisible forces she believed influenced our world. She painted her first abstract series in 1906 at age 44. Yet she rarely exhibited this work because she believed the art world at the time wasn't ready to appreciate it. Her will requested that the paintings stay hidden for at least 20 years after her death.

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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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