Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson )

It's almost hard to believe this is happening again, but Pixel users are reporting that an OS update has locked them out of their phones' internal storage, causing app crashes, non-functional phones, and a real possibility of data loss. Over in the Google Pixel subreddit , user "Liv-Lyf" compiled a dozen posts that complain of an "internal storage access issue" and blame the January 2024 Google Play system update.

In October, Pixel phones faced a nightmare storage bug that caused bootlooping, inaccessible devices, and data loss. The recent post says, "The symptoms are all the same" as that October bug, with "internal storage not getting mounted, camera crashes, Files app shows no files, screenshots not getting saved, internal storage shows up empty in ADB Shell, etc." When asked for a comment, Google told Ars, "We're aware of this issue and are looking into it," and a Google rep posted effectively the same statement in the comments.

In the October bug, users were locked out of their system storage due to a strange permissions issue. Having a phone try to run without any user access to your own storage is a mess. It breaks the camera and screenshots because you can't write media. File Managers read "0 bytes" for every file and folder. Nothing works over USB, and some phones, understandably, just fail to boot. The issue in October arrived as part of the initial Android 14 release and only affected devices that had multiple users set up.

Enlarge / Some bugs are just perennially out of reach. (credit: Getty Images)

Back in June 2002, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth was experiencing space for the first time, the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Microsoft was reaching its final arguments , and Adam Price, using what was then called Mozilla on a Mac, had an issue with persistent tooltips .

"If I mouseover a toolbar link, and wait for a second, a little yellow box with the description of the link appears. If I now use command-tab to move Mozilla to the background, the little yellow box stays there, in the foreground. The only way to get rid of it is to put mozilla in the foreground again, and move the mouse off the toolbar," Price wrote on June 2. There were a few other bugs related to this issue, but Price set down a reproducible issue, confirmed by many others in the weeks to come—and months to come, years to come, and more than two decades to come.

Firefox tooltip lingering over an Applications window in Mac OS X, captured 12 years ago. (credit: edrazaba / Mozilla )

Over the years, people would check in on the thread or mark other bugs as duplicates of this one issue. It would occasionally seem fixed, only for coders and commenters to discover that it was just a little different in different versions or that prior fixes were seemingly accidental. Sometimes it seemed to appear in Windows or Linux, too. One commenter, denis, noted that at the 21-year mark : "I'm kinda partial to let it be forever. It feels like a relic from the past."

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket )

Since the earliest days of Twitter, the easiest way to find out more about an account was to look beyond its tweets and dig deeper into who follows that account and who that account is following. Now, users are discovering that Twitter seems to either be glitching or intentionally limiting access to the complete lists of any given user's followers or who they are following.

Ars easily replicated the error by clicking on various accounts and finding that Twitter only showed a partial list of accounts a user follows or is following. For Twitter owner Elon Musk's account, for example, instead of seeing all 339 accounts he follows, Twitter only showed 64 accounts. Currently, it seems that users can only review complete lists of their own followers and following lists.

It's likely that Twitter is simply glitching, but it's possible that the company is planning to restrict who can view an account's followers and following lists, potentially reserving that privilege for paid subscribers someday. Earlier this month, the @TitterDaily account confirmed that the ability to direct message accounts that don't follow you would be restricted to paid Twitter subscribers.

When a rare species is a product.

Alive or dead, rare or mundane, bugs are weirdly easy to find for sale online. However, in some cases, the insects or spiders sold through the various e-commerce sites, both niche and large-scale, may be of dubious provenance. Some may be bred and reared in sustainable programs. Others might be taken from wild populations that are at risk, according to new research out of Cornell University that was published last week.

“It’s not always clear… if they’re sustainable or not,” John Losey, a Cornell entomology professor and one of the paper’s authors, told Ars. “There are sites out there that are definitely not providing documentation that what they’re selling is being done sustainably.”

According to Losey, some websites will provide no documentation or proof showing that a rare pinned butterfly specimen or pet tarantula was collected in a way that doesn't pose a risk for wild populations. Some of them could very well have been reared in a sustainable program, Losey said—there's just no way to tell.