Enlarge / A Waymo vehicle in San Francisco. (credit: Photo by JasonDoiy via Getty Images)

On a Friday evening last November, police chased a silver sedan across the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The fleeing vehicle entered San Francisco and went careening through the city’s crowded streets. At the intersection of 11th and Folsom streets, it sideswiped the fronts of two other vehicles, veered onto a sidewalk, and hit two pedestrians.

According to a local news story , both pedestrians were taken to the hospital with one suffering major injuries. The driver of the silver sedan was injured, as was a passenger in one of the other vehicles.

No one was injured in the third car, a driverless Waymo robotaxi. Still, Waymo was required to report the crash to government agencies. It was one of 20 crashes with injuries that Waymo has reported through June.  And it’s the only crash Waymo has classified as causing a serious injury.

Enlarge / Notice anything missing from the one and only model of the PS5 Pro? (credit: Sony)

Here at Ars, we've been publicly musing about whether the world was ready for a disc-free game console since as far back as 2015 . Now, though, the better question might be whether the world ever needs a new game console with a built-in disc drive at all.

Yesterday's announcement of the PlayStation 5 Pro seemed to treat the existence of disc-based games as an afterthought. You had to be watching pretty closely during Mark Cerny's "technical presentation" video to notice that the coming PS5 Pro is only available in a single disc-drive-free model. And you'd have to read pretty deep into the official PlayStation blog post on the subject to discover that "PS5 Pro is available as a disc-less console, with the option to purchase the currently available Disc Drive for PS5 separately."

That $80 disc drive accessory was introduced as an optional upgrade to the Digital Edition of the PS5 Slim last year, alongside a Slim model that does have a pre-installed disc drive. But now, just one year later, Sony has decided that it only needs a single "disc-less" model of the PS5 Pro as the default.

Enlarge (credit: Jarcosa )

Rapa Nui, often referred to as Easter Island, is one of the most remote populated islands in the world. It's so distant that Europeans didn't stumble onto it until centuries after they had started exploring the Pacific. When they arrived, though, they found that the relatively small island supported a population of thousands, one that had built imposing monumental statues called moai. Arguments over how this population got there and what happened once it did have gone on ever since.

Some of these arguments, such as the idea that the island's indigenous people had traveled there from South America, have since been put to rest. Genomes from people native to the island show that its original population was part of the Polynesian expansion across the Pacific. But others, such as the role of ecological collapse in limiting the island's population and altering its culture, continue to be debated .

Researchers have now obtained genome sequence from the remains of 15 Rapa Nui natives who predate European contact. And they indicate that the population of the island appears to have grown slowly and steadily, without any sign of a bottleneck that could be associated with an ecological collapse. And roughly 10 percent of the genomes appear to have a Native American source that likely dates from roughly the same time that the island was settled.

Enlarge / A staffer with the Paul, Weiss legal firm wheels boxes of legal documents into the Albert V. Bryan US Courthouse at the start of a Department of Justice antitrust trial against Google over its advertiing business in Alexandria, Virginia, on September 9, 2024. Google faces its second major antitrust trial in less than a year, with the US government accusing the tech giant of dominating online advertising and stifling competition. (credit: SAMUEL CORUM / Contributor | AFP )

Just a couple of days into the Google ad tech antitrust trial, it seems clear that the heart of the US Department of Justice's case is proving that Google Ad Manager is the key to the tech giant's alleged monopoly.

Google Ad Manager is the buy-and-sell side ad tech platform launched following Google's acquisition of DoubleClick and AdX in 2008 for $3 billion. It is currently used to connect Google's publisher ad servers with its ad exchanges, tying the two together in a way that allegedly locks the majority of publishers into paying higher fees on the publisher side because they can't afford to drop Google's ad exchange.

The DOJ has argued that Google Ad Manager "serves 90 percent of publishers that use the ad tech tools to sell their online ad inventory," AdAge reported, and through it, Google clearly wields monopoly powers.

Enlarge / The latest Volkswagen Golf GTI isn't perfect, but it has enough charm to overcome its flaws. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

"They won't make them like this much longer" is a pretty hackneyed aphorism, but it certainly applies to the Volkswagen Golf GTI. The Mk 8 Golf is due for a mid-life refresh next year, and when that happens, VW will be simplifying things by dropping the manual transmission option. That means model year 2024 is the final chance anyone will have to buy a GTI with three pedals. Yes, it has some flaws, but it's also small and nimble, both attributes lacking in so much of what the automotive industry has to offer these days.

We've been a bit deficient in not reviewing the Mk 8 Golf GTI until now. I reviewed the more expensive, more powerful Golf R in 2022 , but the last GTI we drove was the outgoing Mk 7 car in mid-2020 . That time, we were only able to source a GTI with the two-pedal, dual-clutch gearbox, a transmission I felt didn't quite suit the engine it was mated to. On the other hand, I was effusive about the old GTI's infotainment, calling it "one of the best systems on the market." Well, it was 2020, remember.

Under the hood, you'll find yet another version of VW Group's venerable EA888 four-cylinder engine, here with a turbocharger and direct injection. It generates 241 hp (180 kW) and 273 lb-ft (370 Nm), with that peak torque arriving at just 1,750 rpm. This sends its power to the front wheels via a seven-speed DSG or the soon-to-be-retired six-speed manual.

Enlarge / Boeing's uncrewed Starliner spaceraft backs away from the International Space Station moments after undocking on September 6, 2024. (credit: NASA)

Nearly a decade ago to the day, I stood in the international terminal of Houston's main airport checking my phone. As I wanted to board a flight for Moscow, an announcement from NASA was imminent, with the agency due to make its selections for private companies that would transport astronauts to the International Space Station.

Then, just before boarding the direct flight to Moscow, a news release from NASA popped into my inbox about its Commercial Crew Program. The space agency, under a fixed price agreement, agreed to pay Boeing $4.2 billion to develop the Starliner spacecraft; SpaceX would receive $2.6 billion for the development of its Crew Dragon vehicle.

At the time, the Space Shuttle had been retired for three years, and NASA's astronauts had to fly to the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz spacecraft. "Today, we are one step closer to launching our astronauts from US soil on American spacecraft and ending the nation’s sole reliance on Russia by 2017," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in the release.

(credit: BalticServers.com)

Data centers powering the generative AI boom are gulping water and exhausting electricity at what some researchers view as an unsustainable pace. Two entrepreneurs who met in high school a few years ago want to overcome that crunch with a fresh experiment: sinking the cloud into the sea.

Sam Mendel and Eric Kim launched their company, NetworkOcean, out of startup accelerator Y Combinator on August 15 by announcing plans to dunk a small capsule filled with GPU servers into San Francisco Bay within a month. “There's this vital opportunity to build more efficient computer infrastructure that we're gonna rely on for decades to come,” Mendel says.

The founders contend that moving data centers off land would slow ocean temperature rise by drawing less power and letting seawater cool the capsule’s shell, supplementing its internal cooling system. NetworkOcean’s founders have said a location in the bay would deliver fast processing speeds for the region’s buzzing AI economy .

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

It’s not every day that a security researcher acquires the ability to generate counterfeit HTTPS certificates, track email activity, and execute code of his choice on thousands of servers—all in a single blow that cost only $20 and a few minutes to land. But that’s exactly what happened recently to Benjamin Harris.

Harris, the CEO and founder of security firm watchTowr, did all of this by registering the domain dotmobilregistry.net. The domain was once the official home of the authoritative WHOIS server for .mobi, a top-level domain used to indicate that a website is optimized for mobile devices. At some point—it’s not clear precisely when—this WHOIS server, which acts as the official directory for every domain ending in .mobi, was relocated, from whois.dotmobiregistry.net to whois.nic.mobi. While retreating to his Las Vegas hotel room during last month’s Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Harris noticed that the previous dotmobiregistry.net owners had allowed the domain to expire. He then scooped it up and set up his own .mobi WHOIS server there.

Misplaced trust

To Harris’s surprise, his server received queries from slightly more than 76,000 unique IP addresses within a few hours of setting it up. Over five days, it received roughly 2.5 million queries from about 135,000 unique systems. The entities behind the systems querying his deprecated domain included a who’s who of Internet heavyweights comprising domain registrars, providers of online security tools, governments from the US and around the world, universities, and certificate authorities, the entities that issue browser-trusted TLS certificates that make HTTPS work.

Enlarge / Artist's illustration of catch arms ensnaring SpaceX's Super Heavy booster. (credit: SpaceX )

The Federal Aviation Administration has signaled to SpaceX that it won't approve a launch license for the next test flight of the Starship rocket until at least late November, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.

This is more than two months later than the mid-September timeframe the FAA previously targeted for determining whether to approve a launch license for the next Starship flight. SpaceX says the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage for the next launch—the fifth full-scale test flight of the Starship program—have been ready to launch since the first week of August.

"The flight test will include our most ambitious objective yet: attempt to return the Super Heavy booster to the launch site and catch it in mid-air," SpaceX said in a statement .