Late last year, California passed a law against the possession or distribution of child sex abuse material (CSAM) that has been generated by AI. The law went into effect on January 1, and Sacramento police announced yesterday that they have already arrested their first suspect—a 49-year-old Pulitzer-prize-winning cartoonist named Darrin Bell.

The new law, which you can read here, declares that AI-generated CSAM is harmful, even without an actual victim. In part, says the law, this is because all kinds of CSAM can be used to groom children into thinking sexual activity with adults is normal. But the law singles out AI-generated CSAM for special criticism due to the way that generative AI systems work.

"The creation of CSAM using AI is inherently harmful to children because the machine-learning models utilized by AI have been trained on datasets containing thousands of depictions of known CSAM victims," it says, "revictimizing these real children by using their likeness to generate AI CSAM images into perpetuity."

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Photography enthusiasts pay a lot for their very powerful cameras. How much more should they pay to put them to much, much easier work as a webcam? However many hundreds of dollars you paid, Canon thinks you should pay $5 per month—or, heck, just $50 per year—to do that.

Roman Zipp detailed his journey from incredulousness to grim resignation in a blog post. He bought his Canon PowerShot G5 X Mark II for something like $900 last year. The compact model gave him the right match of focal length and sensor size for concert pics. What it did not give him was the ability to change anything at all about his webcam feed using Canon's software. (The "$6,299 camera" referenced in Zipp's blog post title is his indication that all models of Canon's cameras face this conundrum, regardless of price point.)

Ah, but that's because Zipp did not pay. If you head to Canon's site, provide a name and email, and manage to grab the EOS Webcam utility when Canon's servers are not failing, you can connect one camera, with one default scene, at 720p, 30 frames per second and adjust everything on the camera itself if you need to. Should you pay $5 per month, or $50 per year, you can unlock EOS Webcam Utility Pro (PDF link), which provides full 60 fps video and most of the features you'd expect out of a webcam that cost hundreds fewer dollars.

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Visionary filmmaker David Lynch—whose work spanned midnight movie staples like Eraserhead (1977), neo-noir psychological thrillers like Mulholland Drive (2001), and beyond—has died at 78. According to Deadline Hollywood, the director had to evacuate his home due to the LA wildfires. He had been diagnosed with severe emphysema a few years ago and rarely left his house due to COVID-19 fears. Following the evacuation, his health deteriorated, and he died at his daughter's house.

“It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch,” the director's family said in a statement. “We would appreciate some privacy at this time. There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’ It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”

Reactions from Hollywood were swift and heartfelt. Kyle MacLachlan, who became a star when Lynch cast him as Paul Atreides in 1984's Dune, Blue Velvet (1986), and the TV series Twin Peaks, described the director as "the most authentically alive person I'd ever met":

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General Motors and its subsidiary OnStar agreed to a settlement that prohibits them from sharing driver location and behavior data with third parties, the Federal Trade Commission announced yesterday. The proposed settlement comes less than a year after GM responded to public backlash by announcing that it stopped sharing driving data from its connected cars with companies such as LexisNexis.

The FTC said it "is taking action against General Motors (GM) and OnStar over allegations they collected, used, and sold drivers' precise geolocation data and driving behavior information from millions of vehicles—data that can be used to set insurance rates—without adequately notifying consumers and obtaining their affirmative consent." GM did not admit to or deny the allegations.

GM and OnStar "will be banned for five years from disclosing consumers' sensitive geolocation and driver behavior data to consumer reporting agencies," the FTC said. Under the settlement, "consumer reporting agency" means a firm that collects or evaluates "consumer credit information or other information on consumers for the purpose of furnishing consumer reports to other parties and which uses any means or facility of interstate commerce for the purpose of preparing or furnishing consumer reports."

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Post-pandemic, my creed became "Bicycles deliver the freedom that auto ads promise." That belief is why I’ve almost exclusively used a bike to move myself around Portland, Oregon since (yes, I have become a Portlandia stereotype).

However, that lifestyle is a lot more challenging without some pedal assistance. For a few summers, I showed up sweaty to appointments after pedaling on a $200 single-speed. So in 2024, I purchased the FX+ 2, based primarily on my managing editor’s review. It’s since been a workhorse for my daily transportation needs for the past year; I've put more than 1,000 miles on it in eight months.

So given my experience with that bike, I was the natural choice to review Trek’s upgraded version, the FX+ 7S.

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Thursday's teaser trailer for the Switch 2 made it abundantly clear that the upcoming console will be quite a bit larger than the original Switch that came before it. But Nintendo is still being coy about the specific dimensions of the Switch 2's expanded tablet and Joy-Cons.

Fortunately, the trailer itself features a number of head-on shots of the Switch 2 hardware next to a known quantity—the original Switch Joy-Cons. Using the established measurements of that older controller (102×35.9 mm) and some Photoshop pixel counting, we can use freeze frames from that trailer to extrapolate a rough size and shape for the Switch 2 hardware.

Using the original Switch Joy-Cons as a reference, we can estimate the size of the Switch 2 shown in the trailer. Credit: Nintendo / Ars Technica

After spending a good chunk of Thursday performing just those calculations, we're ready to estimate that the Switch 2 hardware features a roughly 7.9-inch screen (measured diagonally), up from 6.2 inches on the Switch and 7 inches on the Switch OLED. We also learned that the Switch tablet itself has a roughly 33 percent larger footprint than that of the original Switch (in terms of total area), while the joysticks on the Switch 2 Joy-Cons have a roughly 26 percent larger diameter than those on the Switch.

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Blockbuster weight-loss and diabetes drugs Wegovy and Ozempic top the list of 15 drugs selected for the second round of federal price negotiations, which are scheduled to begin this year, with resulting bargained prices going into effect in 2027.

The first round of negotiations, involving 10 high-cost drugs, wrapped up in August, with resulting prices being 38 percent to 79 percent lower than list prices. Those negotiated prices will go into effect in 2026 and are expected to save people with Medicare prescription drug coverage $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs.

“Last year we proved that negotiating for lower drug prices works," Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said in a statement. "Now we plan to build on that record by negotiating for lower prices for 15 additional important drugs for seniors."

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Apple released new beta versions of iOS 18.3 to developers and the public yesterday, and one of the changes coming with the new software update will (at least temporarily) disable Apple Intelligence notification summaries for all apps in the App Store's News and Entertainment category, at least temporarily.

Apple said earlier this month that it would be instituting updates to how these notifications are handled after complaints from news organizations, and the company has apparently decided to turn them off entirely while it decides what those updates will look like. Most prominently, one user's notification summary from the BBC suggested that Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had died of suicide; this was not true. Other examples have been cropping up since then.

For the notification summaries that remain, Apple is instituting changes to make it clearer when users are reading summaries and to make it easier to turn those summaries off. Notification summaries in iOS 18.3 will be italicized to help further distinguish them from individual non-summarized notifications—before, there was a small icon next to the text to indicate you were looking at a summary. Apple is also making it possible to turn off summaries on a per-app basis directly from the lock screen without diving into the Settings app to do it.

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Lithium may be the key component in most modern batteries, but it doesn't make up the bulk of the material used in them. Instead, much of the material is in the electrodes, where the lithium gets stored when the battery isn't charging or discharging. So one way to make lighter and more compact lithium-ion batteries is to find electrode materials that can store more lithium. That's one of the reasons that recent generations of batteries are starting to incorporate silicon into the electrode materials.

There are materials that can store even more lithium than silicon; a notable example is sulfur. But sulfur has a tendency to react with itself, producing ions that can float off into the electrolyte. Plus, like any electrode material, it tends to expand in proportion to the amount of lithium that gets stored, which can create physical strains on the battery's structure. So while it has been easy to make lithium-sulfur batteries, their performance has tended to degrade rapidly.

But this week, researchers described a lithium-sulfur battery that still has over 80 percent of its original capacity after 25,000 charge/discharge cycles. All it took was a solid electrolyte that was more reactive than the sulfur itself.

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TikTok has lost its Supreme Court appeal in a 9–0 decision and will likely shut down on January 19, a day before Donald Trump's inauguration, unless the app can be sold before the deadline, which TikTok has said is impossible.

During the trial last Friday, TikTok lawyer Noel Francisco warned SCOTUS that upholding the Biden administration's divest-or-sell law would likely cause TikTok to “go dark—essentially the platform shuts down" and "essentially... stop operating." On Wednesday, TikTok reportedly began preparing to shut down the app for all US users, anticipating the loss.

But TikTok's claims that the divest-or-sell law violated Americans' free speech rights did not supersede the government's compelling national security interest in blocking a foreign adversary like China from potentially using the app to spy on or influence Americans, SCOTUS ruled.

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Brussels has ordered Elon Musk to fully disclose recent changes made to recommendations on X, stepping up an investigation into the role of the social media platform in European politics.

The expanded probe by the European Commission, announced on Friday, requires X to hand over internal documents regarding its recommendation algorithm. The Commission also issued a “retention order” for all relevant documents relating to how the algorithm could be amended in future.

In addition, the EU regulator requested access to information on how the social media network moderates and amplifies content.

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Heavy drinking is clearly bad for your health. But it's long been questioned whether moderate drinking is also risky—and, if so, how risky, exactly.

Health researchers have consistently found links between alcohol consumption and several types of cancers (namely mouth, throat, colon, rectal, liver, and breast), as well as liver diseases, injuries, and traffic accidents. But nailing down the health risks from the lower levels of drinking has been tricky. For one, much of the data on moderate drinking is from observational studies in different countries, cultures, and populations. They cannot determine if alcohol is the direct cause of any given association, and they may be swayed by other lifestyle factors. The resulting data can be noisy and inconsistent.

Moreover, many studies rely on people to self-report whether they drink and, if so, how much, which is problematic because people may not accurately assess and/or report how much they actually drink. A related problem is that studies in the past often compared drinkers to people who said they didn't drink. But, the trouble is, non-drinking groups are often some mix of people who are lifelong abstainers and people who used to drink but quit for some reason—maybe because of health effects. This latter group has the potential to have lingering health effects from their drinking days, which could skew any comparisons looking for health differences.

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Welcome to Edition 7.27 of the Rocket Report! Thursday was an eventful day in super heavy lift launch, with Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket having a highly successful debut launch before dawn in Florida, at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Then, on Thursday afternoon, an upgraded Starship took flight from South Texas. The first stage performed well, but the Starship upper stage experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent. Ars will, of course, have full and ongoing coverage.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.

RFA receives launch license. The UK Civil Aviation Authority has issued Rocket Factory Augsburg a vertical launch license to conduct the inaugural flight of its RFA ONE rocket from SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland, European Spaceflight reports. The license is for the launch of the company's RFA One rocket, which has an advertised payload of 1.3 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. RFA said it intends to complete the launch sometime this year.

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SpaceX launched an upgraded version of its massive Starship rocket from South Texas on Thursday, but the flight ended less than nine minutes later after engineers lost contact with the spacecraft.

For a few moments, SpaceX officials discussing the launch on the company's live webcast were unsure of the outcome of the test flight. However, within minutes, residents and tourists in the Turks and Caicos Islands, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico shared videos showing a shower of debris falling through the atmosphere along Starship's expected flight corridor.

The videos confirmed Starship—the rocket's upper stage—broke apart in space, or experienced a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" in SpaceX-speak. This happened well short of the spacecraft's planned trajectory, which would have seen it fly halfway around the world and splash down in the Indian Ocean after more than an hour of flight.

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Cell phones are magnets for our attention, but you can, of course, face significant legal jeopardy for giving them that attention. Just ask the "safety driver" of an Uber self-driving vehicle, which hit and killed a pedestrian in Arizona in 2018. According to authorities, the driver was watching The Voice on Hulu just before the crash—and was then charged with negligent homicide.

These kinds of cases are always tragic because they feel so easily avoidable, but they also happen with enough regularity that it's easy to tune them out. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 3,308 people were killed by distracted drivers in 2022 alone—and "texting is the most alarming distraction."

That's why states continue to crack down on cell phone use while driving. A Colorado law that went into effect on January 1, for instance, bans a driver from using any mobile electronic device unless it is hands-free. Thirty US states now have such bans in place.

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Taking action in the final days of the Biden administration, the Federal Communications Commission dismissed three complaints and a petition filed against broadcast television stations. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said the action is important because "the incoming President has called on the Federal Communications Commission to revoke licenses for broadcast television stations because he disagrees with their content and coverage."

"Today, I have directed the FCC to take a stand on behalf of the First Amendment," she said. "We draw a bright line at a moment when clarity about government interference with the free press is needed more than ever. The action we take makes clear two things. First, the FCC should not be the president's speech police. Second, the FCC should not be journalism's censor-in-chief."

President-elect Donald Trump's chosen replacement for Rosenworcel, Commissioner Brendan Carr, wants the FCC to punish news broadcasters that he perceives as being unfair to Trump or Republicans in general. Backing Trump's various complaints about news stations, Carr has threatened to revoke licenses by wielding the FCC's authority to ensure that broadcasters using public airwaves operate in the public interest.

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Google has added AI features to its regular Workspace accounts for business while slightly raising the baseline prices of Workspace plans.

Previously, AI tools in the Gemini Business plan were a $20 per seat add-on to existing Workspace accounts, which had a base cost of $12 per seat without. Now, the AI tools are included for all Workspace users, but the per-seat base price is increasing from $12 to $14.

That means that those who were already paying extra for Gemini are going to pay less than half of what they were—effectively $14 per seat instead of $32. But those who never used or wanted Gemini or any other newer features under the AI umbrella from Workspace are going to pay a little bit more than before.

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The battery system on an electric car can either charge—from regenerative braking or an external power supply—or discharge—powering the EV's motor(s) or supplying that power via so-called vehicle-to-load. As a rule, it can't do both at once, but General Motors has some thoughts about that. The patent analysis site CarMoses spotted a recent GM patent application for a system that is capable of charging and discharging simultaneously.

The patent describes a "charging system" with a pair of charging ports. One is for drawing power from an external source, just like every other EV. The second charge port is connected to a bi-directional charger, and the battery management system is able to charge the battery pack from the first port while also supplying power from the second port.

That second port could be used to charge another battery, including the battery of another EV, and the patent includes an illustration of three EVs daisy-chained to each other.

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Microsoft has two announcements for subscribers to its Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans today. First, you're getting the Copilot-powered AI features that Microsoft has been rolling out to businesses and Copilot Pro subscribers, like summarizing or generating text in Word, drafting slideshows in PowerPoint based on a handful of criteria, or analyzing data in Excel. Second, you'll be paying more for the privilege of using those features, to the tune of an extra $3 a month or $30 a year.

This raises the price of a Microsoft 365 Personal subscription from $7 a month or $70 a year to $10 and $100; a family subscription goes from $10 a month or $100 a year to $13 a month or $130 a year. For current subscribers, these prices go into effect the next time your plan renews.

Current subscribers are also being given an escape hatch "for a limited time." "Classic" Personal and Family plans at the old prices with no Copilot features included will still be offered, but you'll need to go to the "services & subscriptions" page of your Microsoft account and attempt to cancel your existing subscription to be offered the discounted pricing.

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SpaceX plans to launch the seventh full-scale test flight of its massive Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket Thursday afternoon. It's the first of what might be a dozen or more demonstration flights this year as SpaceX tries new things with the most powerful rocket ever built.

There are many things on SpaceX's Starship to-do list in 2025. They include debuting an upgraded, larger Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2, on the test flight preparing to launch Thursday. The one-hour launch window opens at 5 pm EST (4 pm CST; 22:00 UTC) at SpaceX's launch base in South Texas. You can watch SpaceX's live webcast of the flight here.

SpaceX will again attempt to catch the rocket's Super Heavy booster—more than 20 stories tall and wider than a jumbo jet—back at the launch pad using mechanical arms, or "chopsticks," mounted to the launch tower. Read more about the Starship Block 2 upgrades in our story from last week.

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