A day after announcing that CEO Patrick Spence is departing the company, Sonos revealed that chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin is also leaving. Bouvat-Merlin had the role since 2023.

As first reported by Bloomberg, Sonos will not fill the chief product officer role. Instead, Tom Conrad, the interim CEO Sonos announced yesterday, will take on the role's responsibilities. In an email to staff cited by Bloomberg (you can read the letter in its entirety at The Verge), Conrad explained:

With my stepping in as CEO, the board, Max, and I have agreed that my background makes the chief product officer role redundant. Therefore, Max’s role is being eliminated and the product organization will report directly to me. I’ve asked Max to advise me over the next period to ensure a smooth transition and I am grateful that he’s agreed to do that.

In May, Sonos released an update to its app that led to customers, many of them long-time users, revolting over broken features, like accessibility capabilities and the ability to set timers. Sonos expects that remedying the app and Sonos' reputation will cost it at least $20 million to $30 million. 

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Eli Lilly and other drugmakers are reportedly planning to urge the Trump administration to pause Medicare drug-price negotiations that were put in place by the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

"They need to fix [the IRA]," Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks told Bloomberg at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.

The results of the first round of IRA negotiations, announced in August, saw the list prices of 10 high-cost drugs get slashed by as much as 79 percent. Collectively, the negotiated prices are estimated to save seniors $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs in 2026, when the prices go into effect. The savings will likely be well received, given that KFF polling has found that over a quarter of Americans struggle to afford prescription medications, and 31 percent say they haven't taken medicines as prescribed due to costs.

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OpenAI is making ChatGPT work a little more like older digital assistants with a new feature called Tasks, as reported by TechCrunch and others.

Currently in beta, Tasks allows users to direct the chatbot to send reminders or to generate responses to specific prompts at certain times; recurring tasks are also supported.

The feature is available to Plus, Team, and Pro subscribers starting today, while free users don't have access.

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has announced a dramatic restructuring of the company's engineering organization, which is pivoting the company's focus to developing the tools that will underpin agentic AI.

Dubbed "CoreAI - Platform and Tools," the new division rolls the existing AI platform team and the previous developer division (responsible for everything from .NET to Visual Studio) along with some other teams into one big group.

As for what this group will be doing specifically, it's basically everything that's mission-critical to Microsoft in 2025, as Nadella tells it:

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Anticipating that 2025 will be an "intense year" requiring rapid innovation, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly announced that Meta would be cutting 5 percent of its workforce—targeting "lowest performers."

Bloomberg reviewed the internal memo explaining the cuts, which was posted to Meta's internal Workplace forum Tuesday. In it, Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta was shifting its strategy to "move out low performers faster" so that Meta can hire new talent to fill those vacancies this year.

"I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management," Zuckerberg said. "We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle."

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The Federal Trade Commission said yesterday it is sending over $1 million in refunds to 6,764 consumers who purchased Razer Zephyr masks that were deceptively marketed as providing N95 protection during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The FTC sued Razer in April 2024, and the gaming-hardware company agreed to a settlement, including a $100,000 fine and $1,071,254.33 toward a fund for consumer relief. The payments are being distributed to mask buyers imminently, the FTC announced yesterday.

"The FTC is sending checks and PayPal payments to 6,764 consumers who purchased the deceptively marketed products. Recipients will get a full refund," the agency said. "Consumers should cash their check within 90 days, as indicated on the check, or redeem their PayPal payment within 30 days."

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Plans to block new vehicles with software and hardware linked to either China or Russia are moving ahead. Today, the Department of Commerce published a final rule in the Federal Register that will prohibit the import of vehicles with Chinese or Russian connected-car vehicle software from model year 2027 and Chinese or Russian hardware from model year 2030.

While the move will no doubt protect domestic auto manufacturing from the threat of cheap imports, the ban has been proposed on national security grounds. Specifically, the US government has determined that "malign actors and foreign adversaries" could exploit the "progressively more complex hardware and software systems" on new cars. It also determined that the danger of that happening when that software or hardware is made by a company owned or controlled by either China or Russia is unacceptably high.

The proposed rule covers hardware and software that enable connectivity above 450 MHz and automated driving system software—the sensors or other ADS hardware is not covered by the rule. Originally, the government had also wanted to include OSes, telematics, battery management systems, and advanced driver assistance systems but narrowed the scope in response to public comments. (It also notes that while telematics are indeed a prime attack surface for a foreign adversary since they operate over cellular protocols, that's already covered.)

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A plucky male American stag beetle thinks he's found a mate on a rotting old tree stump—and then realizes there's another male eager to make the same conquest. The two beetles face off in battle, until the first manages to get enough leverage to toss his romantic rival off the stump in a deft display of insect jujitsu. It's the first time this mating behavior has been captured on film, and the stag beetle is just one of the many fascinating insects featured in the second season of A Real Bug's Life, a National Geographic docuseries narrated by Awkwafina.

The genesis for the docuseries lies in a past rumored sequel to Pixar's 1998 animated film A Bug's Life, which celebrated its 25th anniversary two years ago. That inspired producer Bill Markham, among others, to pitch a documentary series on a real bug's life to National Geographic. "It was the quickest commission ever," Markham told Ars last year. "It was such a good idea, to film bugs in an entertaining family way with Pixar sensibilities." And thanks to the advent of new technologies—photogrammetry, probe and microscope lenses, racing drones, ultra-high-speed camera—plus a handful of skilled "bug wranglers," the team was able to capture the bug's-eye view of the world beautifully.

As with the Pixar film, the bugs (and adjacent creatures) are the main characters here, from cockroaches, monarch butterflies, and praying mantises to bees, spiders, and even hermit crabs. The 10 episodes, across two seasons, tell their stories as they struggle to survive in their respective habitats, capturing entire ecosystems in the process: city streets, a farm, the rainforest, a Texas backyard, and the African savannah, for example. Highlights from S1 included the first footage of cockroach egg casings hatching; wrangling army ants on location in a Costa Rica rainforest; and the harrowing adventures of a tiny jumping spider navigating the mean streets of New York City.

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Virtualization software like Parallels and VMware Fusion give Mac owners the ability to run Windows and Linux on top of macOS, but for Apple Silicon Macs, that support was limited to the Arm-based versions of those operating systems. And while Windows and Linux both support some level of x86-to-Arm app translation that attempts to maintain compatibility with most software, there are still plenty of things that demand an Intel or AMD processor with the x86 instruction set.

Last week, Parallels released a new update that partially resolves this problem: Users of Parallels Desktop Pro 20.2.0 now have access to x86 operating systems via an "early technology preview" of Parallels' "proprietary emulation engine."

The technology preview is currently limited to certain 64-bit versions of Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server 2019 and 2022. Parallels also says it has tested several UEFI-compatible Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 22.04.5, Kubuntu 24.04.1, Lubuntu 24.04.1, and Debian versions 12.4 to 12.8. Fedora will install, but it's unstable. 32-bit versions of operating systems, as well as older versions of Windows like Windows 7 or 8, aren't supported.

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Chinese officials have reportedly discussed selling TikTok's US operations to Elon Musk as the threat of a US ban looms.

Sources "familiar with the matter" told Bloomberg that Chinese officials would "strongly prefer" that ByteDance remain in control of TikTok US, but if TikTok's bid to get the Supreme Court to block the ban fails, ByteDance wants to be prepared with "contingency plans."

One of those supposed contingency plans would apparently see Musk operating TikTok as part of X (formerly Twitter) operations. Under that scenario, Musk's X would control TikTok US, sources said, and thus gain access to a massive trove of TikTok data that the US has alleged poses a grave national security risk if left under a Chinese-owned company's control.

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Texas has sued insurance provider Allstate, alleging that the firm and its data broker subsidiary used data from apps like GasBuddy, Routely, and Life360 to quietly track drivers and adjust or cancel their policies.

Allstate and Arity, a "mobility data and analytics" firm founded by Allstate in 2016, collected "trillions of miles worth of location data" from more than 45 million people, then used that data to adjust rates, according to Texas' lawsuit. This violates Texas' Data Privacy and Security Act, which requires "clear notice and informed consent" on how collected data can be used. A statement from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the suit is the first-ever state action targeting comprehensive data privacy violations.

“Our investigation revealed that Allstate and Arity paid mobile apps millions of dollars to install Allstate’s tracking software,” Paxton said in a statement. “The personal data of millions of Americans was sold to insurance companies without their knowledge or consent in violation of the law. Texans deserve better, and we will hold all these companies accountable.”

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People who appreciate good astrophotography will no doubt be familiar with the work of Don Pettit, a veteran NASA astronaut who is closing in on having lived 500 days of his life in space.

Pettit is now in the midst of his third stint on the International Space Station, and the decade he had to prepare for his current stay in orbit was put to good use. Accordingly, he is well stocked on cameras, lenses, and plans to make the most of six months in space to observe the planets and heavens from an incredible vantage point.

Ars has previously written admiringly of Pettit's work, but his latest image deserves additional mention. When I first saw it, I was dazzled by its beauty. But when I looked further into the image, there were just so many amazing details to be found.

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Amazon is gearing up to relaunch its Alexa voice-powered digital assistant as an artificial intelligence “agent” that can complete practical tasks, as the tech group races to resolve the challenges that have dogged the system’s AI overhaul.

The $2.4 trillion company has for the past two years sought to redesign Alexa, its conversational system embedded within 500 million consumer devices worldwide, so the software’s “brain” is transplanted with generative AI.

Rohit Prasad, who leads the artificial general intelligence (AGI) team at Amazon, told the Financial Times the voice assistant still needed to surmount several technical hurdles before the rollout.

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On any given day, SpaceX is probably launching a Falcon 9 rocket, rolling one out to the launch pad or bringing one back into port. With three active Falcon 9 launch pads and an increasing cadence at the Starbase facility in Texas, SpaceX's teams are often doing all three.

The company achieved another milestone Friday with the 25th successful launch and landing of a single Falcon 9 booster. This rocket, designated B1067, launched a batch of 21 Starlink Internet satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

The rocket's nine kerosene-fueled Merlin 1D engines powered the 21 Starlink satellites into space, then separated from the Falcon 9's upper stage, which accelerated the payload stack into orbit. The 15-story-tall booster returned to a vertical propulsive landing on one of SpaceX's offshore drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean a few hundred miles downrange from Cape Canaveral.

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If you’re having trouble sleeping at night, have you tried to induce total existential dread by contemplating the end of the entire Universe?

If not, here’s a rundown of five ideas exploring how “all there is” might become “nothing at all.”

Enjoy.

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Blue Origin announced late on Monday afternoon that it planned to make a second attempt to launch the New Glenn rocket at 1 am ET (06:00 UTC) on Tuesday. But then, a couple of hours later, the company said it would move the launch to Thursday.

Although the company provided no information about why it was slipping the launch two more days, it likely involved both technical work after an initial launch scrub on Monday morning and concerns about weather early on Tuesday.

In its short update on Monday afternoon, Blue Origin confirmed earlier reporting by Ars that the first launch attempt on Monday morning was scrubbed due to ice buildup on a vent line. "This morning’s scrub was due to ice forming in a purge line on an auxiliary power unit that powers some of our hydraulic systems," the company said.

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The onion supplier behind a deadly E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald's Quarter Pounders this past fall had numerous health and sanitation violations, including employees with unwashed hands, dirty equipment, and puddles of Listeria bacteria. That's according to a Food and Drug Administration inspection report that was obtained by CBS News via a Freedom of Information Act request.

On October 22, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the outbreak investigation, which at that time had only been linked to 48 illnesses across 10 states, including one death. The slivered onions on the fast-food giant's popular Quarter Pounder burgers were an immediate suspect. McDonald's temporarily pulled the burgers from the menu in affected states, and the supplier of the suspect onions, Taylor Farms of Colorado, swiftly recalled thousands of cases. Ultimately, 104 were sickened across 14 states, with 34 people hospitalized and one dead.

On October 28, the FDA began a multi-day inspection of Taylor Farms' facility in Colorado Springs, in which inspectors found numerous violations. The facility processes "ready-to-eat" (RTE) produce, like the cut onions, that do not go through a lethal treatment step for any environmental pathogens before being sold to consumers. This makes any unsanitary conditions in the facility particularly risky for food safety.

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Mastodon announced Monday that it's shifting its structure over the next six months to become wholly owned by a European nonprofit organization—"affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual."

This takes control of the social network away from its previous "ultimate decision-maker," Eugen Rochko. As founder, Rochko initially took the reins to ensure the decentralized platform would never be for sale and "would be free of the control of a single wealthy individual." His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.

The news comes after leaders of other social networks, like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, have sparked backlash over sudden changes to popular apps like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). For years, Musk has drawn criticism for changing Twitter's hate speech policies through his X rebranding. And more recently, Zuckerberg this month defended Meta's decision to relax hate speech policies (permitting women to be called "property" and gay people to be called "mentally ill") by calling bans on such speech "out of touch with mainstream discourse."

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Neverwinter Nights came out in 2002 and received an enhanced edition in 2018. In 2025, that should really be it, but there's something special about Bioware's second dip into the Dungeons & Dragons universe. The energy from the game's community is strong enough that, based largely on the work of "unpaid software engineers," the game received a new patch last week.

Neverwinter Nights (NN) Enhanced Edition (on Steam and GOG) now has anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering built in, major improvements to its networking code and performance, and more than 100 other improvements. As noted by PC Gamer, NN was originally built for single-core CPUs, so while it may seem odd to seek "major" improvements to performance for a 23-year-old RPG, it is far from optimized for modern systems.

NN received a similar fan-led patch, described as "a year-long love effort" by community developers, in 2023.

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When we first tested Super Cruise in 2018, the partially automated driver's assist impressed us enough that we wanted to see it rolled out across as much of General Motors' lineup as possible. Seven years later, our attitude toward such driver assists is a little more sober. Drivers are often more confident about such systems than they ought to be, and that's when they even care about such features in the first place.

That said, Super Cruise remains one of the better implementations of what the industry has inelegantly labeled "level 2+" driver assists: in plain English, a system that lets the driver go hands-free for long stretches, as long as they're paying attention to the road. Which, in Super Cruise's case, is achieved via an infrared camera that faces the driver and follows their gaze, even if they're wearing sunglasses.

Better yet, it's also tightly geofenced, as it's only meant to be used on restricted access, divided-lane highways.

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