Since Amazon announced plans for a generative AI version of Alexa, we were concerned about user privacy. With Alexa+ rolling out to Amazon Echo devices in the coming weeks, we’re getting a clearer view at the privacy concessions people will have to make to maximize usage of the AI voice assistant and avoid bricking functionality of already-purchased devices.

In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” enabled on their Echo. Starting on March 28, recordings of everything spoken to the Alexa living in Echo speakers and smart displays will automatically be sent to Amazon and processed in the cloud.

Attempting to rationalize the change, Amazon’s email said:

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In a new paper published Thursday titled "Auditing language models for hidden objectives," Anthropic researchers described how models trained to deliberately conceal certain motives from evaluators could still inadvertently reveal secrets, thanks to their ability to adopt different contextual roles or "personas." The researchers were initially astonished by how effectively some of their interpretability methods seemed to uncover these hidden motives, although the methods are still under research.

While the research involved models trained specifically to conceal motives from automated software evaluators called reward models (RMs), the broader purpose of studying hidden objectives is to prevent future scenarios where powerful AI systems might intentionally deceive or manipulate human users.

While training a language model using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), reward models are typically tuned to score AI responses according to how well they align with human preferences. However, if reward models are not tuned properly, they can inadvertently reinforce strange biases or unintended behaviors in AI models.

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Pour one out for Google Assistant, the sometimes helpful but often frustrating digital assistant Google launched in 2016. In its place, users will encounter Gemini, the generative AI Google has been integrating into every product in its portfolio. Later this year, Google will make Gemini its only supported assistant, forcing most of its users to abandon Assistant once and for all.

The Gemini brand is barely a year old, but Google has moved aggressively to increase usage. When it released the Gemini app on Android, Google forced anyone who installed it to disable Assistant and switch to Gemini. It did this despite a plethora of missing features and the omnipresent issues of AI hallucinations. The company has forged ahead with Gemini's expansion in the intervening months, making Assistant's demise rather unsurprising.

Since Gemini's debut, users have had the option of sticking with the legacy assistant, but that's not going to be an option soon. On mobile devices, the upgrade path (if you want to call it that) is clear. Most newly released phones already ship with Gemini as the default, and Google will prompt any remaining Assistant users to get the Gemini app. When Assistant is put out to pasture later in 2025, Google will remove the app from app stores and direct users to Gemini instead.

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We’re an audiobook family at House Hutchinson, and at any given moment my wife or I are probably listening to one while puttering around. We've collected a bit over 300 of the things—mostly titles from web sources (including Amazon's Audible) and from older physical "books on tape" (most of which are actually on CDs). I don't mind doing the extra legwork of getting everything into files and then dragging-n-dropping those files into the Books app on my Mac, but my wife prefers to simply use Audible's app to play things directly—it's (sometimes) quick, it's (generally) easy, and it (occasionally) works.

But a while back, the Audible app stopped working for her. Tapping the app's "Library" button would just show a spinning loading icon, forever. All the usual troubleshooting (logging in and out in various ways, removing and reinstalling the app, other familiar rituals) yielded no results; some searching around on Google and DuckDuckGo led me to nothing except a lot of other people having the same problem and a whole lot of silence from Audible and Amazon.

So, having put in the effort to do things the "right" way and having that way fail, I changed tacks and fixed the problem, permanently, with Audiobookshelf.

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One of the best mostly invisible updates in iOS 18 was Apple's decision to finally implement the Rich Communications Services (RCS) communication protocol, something that is slowly helping to fix the generally miserable experience of texting non-iPhone users with an iPhone. The initial iOS 18 update brought RCS support to most major carriers in the US, and the upcoming iOS 18.4 update is turning it on for a bunch of smaller prepaid carriers like Google Fi and Mint Mobile.

Now that Apple is on board, iPhones and their users can also benefit from continued improvements to the RCS standard. And one major update was announced today: RCS will now support end-to-end encryption using the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol, a standard finalized by the Internet Engineering Task Force in 2023.

"RCS will be the first large-scale messaging service to support interoperable E2EE between client implementations from different providers," writes GSMA Technical Director Tom Van Pelt in the post announcing the updates. "Together with other unique security features such as SIM-based authentication, E2EE will provide RCS users with the highest level of privacy and security for stronger protection from scams, fraud and other security and privacy threats. "

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We know Earth formed roughly 4.54 billion years ago and that the first single cell lifeforms were present roughly 1 billion years after that. What we don’t know is what triggered the process that turned our planet from a barren ball of rock into a world hosting amazing abundance of lifeforms. “We’re trying to understand how do you go from non-life to life. Now I think we have made a real contribution to solving this mystery,” says Richard Zare, a Stanford University chemistry professor. Zare is the senior author of the recent study into a previously unknown electrochemical process that might have helped supply the raw materials needed for life.

Zare’s team demonstrated the existence of micro-lightning, very small electricity discharges that occur between tiny droplets of water spray. When triggered in a mixture of gases made to replicate the atmosphere on early Earth, these micro-lightnings produced chemical compounds used by present-day life, like glycine, uracil, and urea, along with chemical precursors like cyanoacetylene, and hydrogen cyanide. “I’m not saying it’s the only way this could happen—I wasn’t there,” Zare acknowledged. “But it’s a new plausible mechanism that gives us building blocks of life.”

Lightning in the bulb

Scientific research into the beginnings of life on Earth started in the 1920s with Aleksander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane, scientists who independently proposed that life on Earth could have arisen through a process of gradual chemical evolution. In their view, inorganic molecules might have reacted due to energy from the Sun or lightning strikes to form life’s building blocks, like amino acids. Those building blocks, Oparin and Haldane argued, could have accumulated in the oceans, making a “primordial soup.”

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Elon Musk's Tesla is waving a red flag, warning that Donald Trump's trade war risks dooming US electric vehicle makers, triggering job losses, and hurting the economy.

In an unsigned letter to the US Trade Representative (USTR), Tesla cautioned that Trump's tariffs could increase costs of manufacturing EVs in the US and forecast that any retaliatory tariffs from other nations could spike costs of exports.

"Tesla supports a robust and thorough process" to "address unfair trade practices," but only those "which, in the process, do not inadvertently harm US companies," the letter said.

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As he consolidates control over Relativity Space, new owner and chief executive Eric Schmidt is planning significant changes at the launch company, including a likely move to the Lone Star State.

Schmidt's recent acquisition of the California-based company, which has largely evolved away from its 3D-printing origins to becoming a more conventional rocket developer, has solved Relativity's primary need. The company has been in a cash crunch for months, and being acquired by one of the 50 wealthiest people on the planet provides financial stability.

One source said Schmidt has made a "mega" investment in Relativity, but the company has not publicly stated the size. It is likely to be at least $1 billion, if not more. Schmidt is also taking an active hand in operations.

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Tesla has a real image problem. Once, it was the beloved brand for the environmentally aware car buyer; more than that, it was the hottest thing in town. Hundreds of thousands of fans paid thousand-dollar deposits and then waited for up to two years for a chance to buy a Model 3, with others paying hefty markups to people at the front of the queue. Back then, of course, Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed to care about climate change—now he seems more likely to be found helping to undo work on climate change.

That has hurt Tesla's new car sales, which have cratered in Europe and declined to a lesser degree in China (where Musk's political activities have less bearing, and decline is more stiff competition from local brands and the lack of a real model range). It has dented the reality-distortion field that surrounds the company's share price, if perhaps only to where it was six months ago. And it has also affected the prices of used Teslas here in the US.

Being a Tesla driver is starting to carry some stigma, and owners are unused to the opprobrium they are now facing for their choice of electric vehicle. "Two weeks ago, I was called a Nazi in the parking lot at Kroger," one owner told The New York Times. The YouTuber Vegas Tesla Family just posted a video explaining that he was selling his Tesla "because of Elon Musk." And more than one Ars commenter has sold their Tesla in recent weeks as a direct result of Musk.

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With measles declared eliminated from the US in 2000 and national herd immunity strong, health experts have recommended that American children get two doses of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine—the first between the ages of 12 and 15 months and the second between the ages of 4 and 6 years, before they start school.

Before 12 months, vulnerable infants in the US have been protected in part by maternal antibodies early in infancy as well as the immunity of the people surrounding them. But if they travel to a place where population immunity is unreliable, experts recommend that infants ages 6 to 11 months get an early dose—then follow it up with the standard two doses at the standard times, bringing the total to three doses.

The reason they would need three—and the reason experts typically recommend waiting until 12 months—is because the maternal antibodies infants carry can interfere with the vaccine response, preventing the immune system from mounting long-lasting protection. Still, the early dose provides boosted protection in that 6-to-11-month interval.

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In spite of sky-high costs and little in the way of profits, generative AI systems continue to proliferate. The Trump administration has called for a national AI Action Plan to guide America's burgeoning AI industry, and OpenAI was happy to use that as an opportunity to decry the negative effect of copyright enforcement on AI development. Google has also released its policy proposal, which agrees with OpenAI on copyright while also prompting the government to back the AI industry with funding and policy changes.

Like OpenAI, Google has been accused of piping copyrighted data into its models, but content owners are wising up. Google is fighting several lawsuits, and the New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI could set the precedent that AI developers are liable for using that training data without permission. Google wants to avoid that. It calls for "balanced copyright rules," but its preference doesn't seem all that balanced.

The dearth of available training data is a well-known problem in AI development. Google claims that access to public, often copyrighted, data is critical to improving generative AI systems. Google wants to be able to use publicly available data (free or copyrighted) for AI development without going through "unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations." The document claims any use of copyrighted material in AI will not significantly impact rightsholders.

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An attention-grabbing Kickstarter campaign attempting to reinvent the measuring spoon has turned into a mad, mad, mad, mad world for backers after years of broken promises and thousands of missing spoons.

The mind-boggling design for the measuring spoon first wowed the Internet in 2016 after a video promoting the Kickstarter campaign went viral and spawned widespread media coverage fawning over the unique design.

Known as Polygons, the three-in-one origami measuring spoons have a flat design that can be easily folded into common teaspoon and tablespoon measurements. "Regular spoons are so 3000 BC," a tagline on the project's website joked.

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Reddit has shown a growing commitment to promoting ads on its platform, especially since going public a year ago. But in the interest of not completely alienating customers with incessant, irrelevant, or personally offensive ads, the social media company is giving users the ability to block advertisers for a year.

In a Reddit post last night, a Reddit employee known as cozy_sheets said that clicking “Hide” on an unwanted ad on Reddit will soon result in Reddit automatically hiding “future ads from that advertiser account for at least a year (you can re-hide the ad after that period of time).” The change will debut on the Reddit website and Reddit’s iOS and Android app throughout “the next several weeks,” according to the announcement.

Reddit didn't detail what limits it will use to ensure that users don't block every single advertiser for an ad-free Reddit. Some users have already reported seeing a daily limit for hiding ads, though.

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Welcome to Edition 7.35 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX's steamroller is still rolling, but for the first time in many years, it doesn't seem like it's rolling downhill. After a three-year run of perfect performance—with no launch failures or any other serious malfunctions—SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has suffered a handful of issues in recent months. Meanwhile, SpaceX's next-generation Starship rocket is having problems, too. Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX's vice president of launch, addressed some (but not all) of these concerns in a post on X this week. Despite the issues with the Falcon 9, SpaceX has maintained a remarkable launch cadence. As of Thursday, SpaceX has launched 28 Falcon 9 flights since January 1, ahead of last year's pace.

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.

Alpha rocket preps for weekend launch. While Firefly Aerospace is making headlines for landing on the Moon, its Alpha rocket is set to launch again as soon as Saturday morning from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The two-stage, kerosene-fueled rocket will launch a self-funded technology demonstration satellite for Lockheed Martin. It's the first of up to 25 launches Lockheed Martin has booked with Firefly over the next five years. This launch will be the sixth flight of an Alpha rocket, which has become a leader in the US commercial launch industry for dedicated missions with 1 ton-class satellites.

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Back in 2020, when the COVID pandemic was still new, everyone was "sheltering in place" and bingeing films and television. Pandemic-related fare proved especially popular, including the 1995 medical disaster-thriller Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman. Chalk it up to morbid curiosity, which some researchers have suggested is an evolved response mechanism for dealing with threats by learning from imagined experiences. Outbreak turned 30 this week, making this the perfect time to revisit the film.

(Spoilers for Outbreak abound below.) 

Outbreak deals with the re-emergence of a deadly virus called Motaba, 28 years after it first appeared in an African jungle, infecting US soldiers and many others. The US military secretly destroyed the camp to conceal evidence of the virus, a project overseen by Major General Donald McClintock (Donald Sutherland) and Brigadier General William Ford (Morgan Freeman). When it re-emerges in Zaire decades later, a military doctor, Colonel Sam Daniels (Hoffman), takes a team to the afflicted village to investigate, only to find the entire town has died.

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Apple released a new version of the basic $349 iPad this week, though you could be forgiven for not noticing. The new 11th-generation iPad (also known as the "iPad (A16)" or just plain-old "iPad") looks identical to the previous version, it was introduced in a single paragraph buried in the middle of an iPad Air announcement, and the company didn't offer to send any to reviewers. The one I have I bought myself for our 5-year-old, whose hand-me-down 2019 iPad Air 3 is slightly older than he is and a little worse for wear.

There's nothing exciting or even particularly interesting about this tablet. The design is recycled from 2022's 10th-generation iPad, which was itself a lower-rent version of the 2020 iPad Air design. It's powered by a variant of the Apple A16, originally an iPhone chip from 2022. It still doesn't support the regular Apple Pencil or Pencil Pro or the same keyboard accessories as other iPads. It still doesn't have an anti-reflective screen coating, and the screen doesn't feel as nice to use as an iPad Air's or Pro's.

But for all that, this is still probably the purest expression of what the iPad is: a cheap Internet-connected screen for reading and watching things. I say this as someone who has tried every new piece of hardware and software that Apple has introduced to try and make the iPad a powerful and versatile laptop replacement—it still feels like trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole. The more expensive iPads are nice, but I don't end up using them much differently from how I use this bare-bones tablet.

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With federal research funding imperiled by brutal cuts under the Trump administration, biomedical graduate programs nationwide are making tough decisions that will scale back the next generation of scientists.

On Wednesday, news broke that UMass Chan Medical School—a public school in the University of Massachusetts system—has rescinded all offers of admission to biomedical graduate students for the 2025–2026 school year. That means an entire class of future scientists has been wiped out. Those who were initially accepted to the program can try to join again in a future cycle under a priority consideration that won't require them to reapply, according to a letter sent to a previously admitted student that was shared on social media.

In a statement provided to NBC10 Boston, a spokesperson for the school confirmed that several dozen applicants had their acceptance offers rescinded. "With uncertainties related to the funding of biomedical research in this country, this difficult decision was made to ensure that our current students’ progress is not disrupted by the funding cuts and that we avoid matriculating students who may not have robust opportunities for dissertation research," the statement reads.

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A new study from Columbia Journalism Review's Tow Center for Digital Journalism finds serious accuracy issues with generative AI models used for news searches. The research tested eight AI-driven search tools equipped with live search functionality and discovered that the AI models incorrectly answered more than 60 percent of queries about news sources.

Researchers Klaudia Jaźwińska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar noted in their report that roughly 1 in 4 Americans now use AI models as alternatives to traditional search engines. This raises serious concerns about reliability, given the substantial error rate uncovered in the study.

Error rates varied notably among the tested platforms. Perplexity provided incorrect information in 37 percent of the queries tested, whereas ChatGPT Search incorrectly identified 67 percent (134 out of 200) of articles queried. Grok 3 demonstrated the highest error rate, at 94 percent.

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The Athena spacecraft was not exactly flying blind as it approached the lunar surface one week ago. The software on board did a credible job of recognizing nearby craters, even with elongated shadows over the terrain. However, the lander's altimeter had failed.

So while Athena knew where it was relative to the surface of the Moon, the lander did not know how far it was above the surface.

An important detail, that. As a result, the privately built spacecraft struck the lunar surface on a plateau, toppled over, and began to skid across the surface. As it did so, the lander rotated at least once or twice before coming to a stop in a small, shadowed crater.

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Last month a nonprofit that recognizes exceptional undergraduate women and gender minorities with space and aviation internships, the Brooke Owens Fellowship, announced its latest class of "Brookies."

This ninth class of 45 students was selected from more than 400 applications, and they will fan out to aerospace companies across the country, from large firms such as SpaceX and Blue Origin to smaller startups like Vast and Stoke. There they will be paired with executive-level mentors who will help launch their careers.

However there was a cloud hanging over this latest group of exceptional students: They may be the last class of Brookies to receive aerospace internships.

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