Enlarge / The USS Manchester . Just the spot for a Starlink dish. (credit: Department of Defense)

It's no secret that government IT can be a huge bummer. The records retention! The security! So government workers occasionally take IT into their own hands with creative but, err, unauthorized solutions.

For instance, a former US Ambassador to Kenya in 2015 got in trouble after working out of an embassy compound bathroom —the only place where he could use his personal computer (!) to access an unsecured network (!!) that let him log in to Gmail (!!!), where he did much of his official business—rules and security policies be damned.

Still, the ambassador had nothing on senior enlisted crew members of the littoral combat ship USS Manchester , who didn't like the Navy's restriction of onboard Internet access. In 2023, they decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to secretly bolt a Starlink terminal to the "O-5 level weatherdeck" of a US warship .

Enlarge / The energy captured by Balatro 's mobile announcement trailer is terrifyingly spot-on. (credit: LocalThunk)

LocalThunk, the pseudonymous lead developer of the surprise smash hit deckbuilding/roguelike/poker-math-simulation game Balatro , has long given the impression that he understands that his game, having sold 2 million copies , might be a little too good.

To that end, LocalThunk has made the game specifically not about actual gambling, or microtransactions , or anything of the kind. Shortly after it arrived in February 2024 (but after it already got its hooks into one of us ), some storefronts removed or re-rated the game on concerns about its cards and chips themes, causing him to explain his line between random number generation (RNG), risk/reward mechanics, and actual gambling. He literally wrote it into his will that the game cannot be used in any kind of gambling or casino property.

So LocalThunk has done everything he can to ensure Balatro won't waste people's money. Time, though? If you're a Balatro fan already, or more of a mobile gamer than a console or computer player, your time is in danger.

At first glance, these AI-generated Super Mario Bros. videos are pretty impressive. The more you watch, though, the more glitches you'll see. (credit: MarioVGG )

Last month, Google's GameNGen AI model showed that generalized image diffusion techniques can be used to generate a passable, playable version of Doom . Now, researchers are using some similar techniques with a model called MarioVGG to see if an AI model can generate plausible video of Super Mario Bros. in response to user inputs.

The results of the MarioVGG model —available as a pre-print paper published by the crypto-adjacent AI company Virtuals Protocol —still display a lot of apparent glitches, and it's too slow for anything approaching real-time gameplay at the moment. But the results show how even a limited model can infer some impressive physics and gameplay dynamics just from studying a bit of video and input data.

The researchers hope this represents a first step toward "producing and demonstrating a reliable and controllable video game generator," or possibly even "replacing game development and game engines completely using video generation models" in the future.

Enlarge (credit: Marc Piasecki / Contributor | Getty Images Entertainment )

Elon Musk's X has won its appeal on free speech grounds to block AB 587, a California law requiring social media companies to submit annual reports publicly explaining their controversial content moderation decisions.

In his opinion , Ninth Circuit court of appeals judge Milan Smith reversed a district court's ruling that he said improperly rejected Musk's First Amendment argument. Smith was seemingly baffled to find that the "district court performed, essentially, no analysis on this question."

According to Smith, the district court "offered no reason" for finding that AB 587 only compelled commercial speech "except for wanting" to follow "the lead of the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits,” which never dealt with "speech similar" to AB 587's required content moderation reports. Instead, Smith said, the district court seemed to take up California's invitation to invent a new category of commercial speech that did not clash with the First Amendment.

Enlarge / BMW has had some hydrogen fuel cell-powered iX5s in testing for a while, and for Art Basel 2024 this one got a new look courtesy of Es Devlin. (credit: Enes Kucevic/BMW)

Today, BMW announced that it will start selling vehicles with hydrogen fuel cell powertrains in 2028 alongside the battery electric, gasoline-, and diesel-powered cars and SUVs it sells today. It is working with Toyota to develop new fuel cells, targeting half the cost and 20 percent better efficiency than current-generation fuel cell stacks. But the technology should be seen as complementary to battery electric vehicles , not a replacement for them, BMW said.

Earlier this morning, the automaker held a roundtable discussion with Michael Rath, BMW's vice president for hydrogen vehicles, who began by answering the main question I had been planning to ask well before any of the assembled journalists were called on.

"It's a fact: battery electric vehicles are more efficient in well-to-wheel than fuel cell electric vehicles. It's absolutely true that the conversion of electricity into hydrogen and back into electricity in the car generates losses and hence is less efficient than using the electricity directly," Rath said.

Enlarge / High pressure ices near the crust are a feature of water-rich worlds.` (credit: Benoit Gougeon (University of Montreal) )

The possibility that there is liquid water on an exoplanet’s surface usually flags it as “potentially habitable,” but the reality is that too much water might prevent life from taking hold.

“On Earth, the ocean is in contact with some rock. If we have too much water, it creates high-pressure ice underneath the ocean, which separates it from the planet’s rocky interior,” said Caroline Dorn, a geophysicist at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, who led new research in exoplanet interiors.

This high-pressure ice prevents minerals and chemical compounds from being exchanged between the rocks and the water. In theory, that should make the ocean barren and lifeless. But Dorn’s team argues that even exoplanets that have enough water to form such high-pressure ice can host life if the majority of the water is not stored in the surface oceans but is held much deeper in the planet’s core. The water in the core can’t sustain life—it’s not even in its molecular form there. But it means that a substantial fraction of a planet’s water isn’t on the surface, which makes the surface oceans a little more shallow and prevents high-pressure ice from forming at their bottom.

Enlarge (credit: anilyanik via Getty Images )

On Wednesday, federal prosecutors charged a North Carolina musician with defrauding streaming services of $10 million through an elaborate scheme involving AI, as reported by The New York Times. Michael Smith, 52, allegedly used AI to create hundreds of thousands of fake songs by nonexistent bands, then streamed them using bots to collect royalties from platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.

While the AI-generated element of this story is novel, Smith allegedly broke the law by setting up an elaborate fake listener scheme. The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, announced the charges , which include wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. If convicted, Smith could face up to 20 years in prison for each charge.

Smith's scheme, which prosecutors say ran for seven years, involved creating thousands of fake streaming accounts using purchased email addresses. He developed software to play his AI-generated music on repeat from various computers, mimicking individual listeners from different locations. In an industry where success is measured by digital listens, Smith's fabricated catalog reportedly managed to rack up billions of streams.

Enlarge / They know... (credit: Aurich / Getty)

The first wave of major generative AI tools largely were trained on “ publicly available ” data—basically, anything and everything that could be scraped from the Internet. Now, sources of training data are increasingly restricting access and pushing for licensing agreements . With the hunt for additional data sources intensifying, new licensing startups have emerged to keep the source material flowing.

The Dataset Providers Alliance , a trade group formed this summer, wants to make the AI industry more standardized and fair. To that end, it has just released a position paper outlining its stances on major AI-related issues. The alliance is made up of seven AI licensing companies, including music copyright-management firm Rightsify , Japanese stock-photo marketplace Pixta , and generative-AI copyright-licensing startup Calliope Networks . (At least five new members will be announced in the fall.)

Enlarge / Spotify released the Car Thing to the general public in February 2022. It's bricking them in December. (credit: Spotify )

For some of us, few things are more infuriating than when a gadget stops working due to a software change. As we've frequently covered here at Ars, startups and big tech companies are guilty of rendering hardware obsolete and/or stripping it of core functions. A pile of activists are urging the Federal Trade Commission to get involved.

In a letter sent today to Samuel Levine, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, and Serena Viswanathan, associate director of the FTC's Division of Advertising Practices, representatives from 17 groups, including Consumer Reports, the US PIRG, and iFixit, urged the FTC for "clear guidance" around software tethering. Software tethering, per the letter, is "making functions of a device reliant on embedded software that ties the device back to a manufacturer’s servers.” As it stands, the practice is hurting customers with "unfair and deceptive practices," such as suddenly locking features behind a subscription —like the Snoo smart bassinet recently did—or bricking already-purchased devices, which Spotify did with its Car Thing .

The letter to the FTC argues that such practices hinder owners' ability to own their hardware.