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For the 2025 model year, Aston Martin's user interface took a major step forward across the lineup, with improvements to the physical controls and digital infotainment, as well as updated gauge cluster layouts. However, the big news dropped in the spring, when Aston and Apple announced the launch of CarPlay Ultra, the next generation of Apple's nearly ubiquitous automotive operating system.

Ultra extends beyond the strictly “phone” functions of traditional CarPlay to now encompass more robust vehicular integration, including climate control, drive modes, and the entire gauge cluster readout. Running Ultra, therefore, requires a digital gauge cluster. So far, not many automakers other than Aston have signaled their intent to join the revolution: Kia/Hyundai/Genesis will adopt Ultra next, and Porsche may come after that.

Before future partnerships come to fruition, I spent a week with a DB12 Volante to test Ultra's use cases and conceptual failure points, most critically to discover whether this generational leap actually enhances or detracts from an otherwise stellar driving experience.

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Broadcom is kicking some cloud service providers (CSPs) out of the VMware channel partner program, bringing uncertainty for the technological and financial futures of numerous businesses, especially small-to-medium-sized ones.

As reported by The Register today, Broadcom this week revealed to VMware CSP partners that it is launching a new invite-only channel program for CSPs on November 1. Fewer CSPs are expected to be eligible for this new program. The Register said that “some mid-size partners won’t be invited to the new program."

Current VMware CSPs that didn’t receive an invite for the new program by today have reportedly been cut and will receive a notice of non-renewal.

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Mercedes provided flights from Detroit to Copenhagen, Denmark, and accommodation so Ars could drive the CLA with EQ Technology. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

The Mercedes-Benz CLA is a marked departure from Mercedes' EV efforts. Instead of a dedicated line of EQ vehicles—like the EQB, EQC, and EQS—we're getting vehicles "with EQ Technology." It started with the electric G Wagon, but the CLA is the first mainstream product to make the change. The thing is that the change is significant and for the better. Several months ago, we got some time in a prototype CLA; now we've driven the final product.

The CLA returns for the 2026 model year as an EV first (with a hybrid coming) on an all-new 800-volt architecture. This architecture will find its way to other Mercedes vehicles, like the upcoming GLB and GLC. This thoroughly modern setup features some of the company's biggest innovations.

The CLA will be available with either one or two electric motors, with a two-speed setup for efficiency and performance. The 250+ base model makes 268 hp (200 kW) and 247 lb-ft (335 Nm) of torque. Mercedes is claiming up to 792 km of range with this model on the WLTP cycle. Accounting for WLTP's optimism, it's still possible we might see an EPA-rated range over 400 miles, but Mercedes isn't quoting any real numbers yet.

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Researchers from the Google Threat Intelligence Group said that hackers are compromising SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) appliances, which sit at the edge of enterprise networks and manage and secure access by mobile devices.

The targeted devices are end of life, meaning they no longer receive regular updates for stability and security. Despite the status, many organizations continue to rely on them. That has left them prime targets by UNC6148, the name Google has given to the unknown hacking group.

“GTIG recommends that all organizations with SMA appliances perform analysis to determine if they have been compromised,” a report published Wednesday said, using the abbreviation for Google Threat Intelligence Group. “Organizations should acquire disk images for forensic analysis to avoid interference from the rootkit anti-forensic capabilities. Organizations may need to engage with SonicWall to capture disk images from physical appliances.”

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Valve's famously permissive rules for what games are and are not allowed on Steam got a little less permissive this week, seemingly in response to outside pressure from some of its partner companies. In a Tuesday update to the "Rules and Guidelines" section of Steam's Onboarding Documentation, the company added a new rule prohibiting "Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or Internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content."

On its own, the new rule seems rather vague, with no details on which of the many kinds of "adult only content" would belong in the "certain" subset prohibited by these unnamed payment processors and ISPs. But the trackers over at SteamDB noticed that the publication of the new rule coincides with the removal of dozens of Steam games whose titles make reference to incest, along with a handful of sex games referencing "slave" or "prison" imagery.

Holding the keys to the bank

Valve isn't alone in having de facto restrictions on content imposed on them by outside payment processors. In 2022, for instance, Visa suspended all payments to Pornhub's ad network after the adult video site was accused of profiting from child sexual abuse materials. And PayPal has routinely disallowed payments to file-sharing sites and VPN providers over concerns surrounding piracy of copyrighted materials.

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xAI continues to face backlash over its Memphis data center, as the NAACP joined groups today appealing the issuance of a recently granted permit that the groups say will allow xAI to introduce major new sources of pollutants without warning at any time.

The battle over the gas turbines powering xAI's data center began last April when thermal imaging seemed to show that the firm was lying about dozens of seemingly operational turbines that could be a major source of smog-causing pollution. By June, the NAACP got involved, notifying the Shelby County Health Department (SCHD) of its intent to sue xAI to force Elon Musk's AI company to engage with community members in historically Black neighborhoods who are believed to be most affected by the pollution risks.

But the NAACP's letter seemingly did nothing to stop the SCHD from granting the permits two weeks later on July 2, as well as exemptions that xAI does not appear to qualify for, the appeal noted. Now, the NAACP—alongside environmental justice groups; the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC); and Young, Gifted and Green—is appealing. The groups are hoping the Memphis and Shelby County Air Pollution Control Board will revoke the permit and block the exemptions, agreeing that the SCHD's decisions were fatally flawed, violating the Clean Air Act and local laws.

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Netflix has finally released an extended teaser for the fifth and final season of Stranger Things, airing late this year. It's got everything we could hope for in terms of the conclusive showdown—spooky shots of the Upside Down bleeding into Hawkins, attacking demo-dogs, flamethrowers—plus an armed and dangerous Linda Hamilton taking on the monsters beside our plucky Hawkins crew.

(Spoilers for prior seasons below.)

S4 ended with Vecna—the Big Bad behind it all—opening the gate that allowed the Upside Down to leak into Hawkins. We're getting a time jump for S5, but in a way, we're coming full circle, since the events coincide with the third anniversary of Will's original disappearance in S1. The fifth season will have eight episodes, and each one will be looong—akin to eight feature-length films. Per the official premise:

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Ars Technica's community is—in our biased opinion—second to none online. For more than 26 years, readers have enabled and inspired our work, creating a community with an amazing signal-to-noise ratio. To aid these efforts, we're updating our Posting Guidelines to make them more accessible to new readers—and more straightforward and more transparent for everyone.

The substance of the guidelines isn't changing. Most provisions are just common-sense items meant to foster genuine discussion, such as the prohibitions against hate speech, personal attacks, trolling, and spam. We did, however, think a few rules could be clarified and that we could explain the moderation process more clearly. To that end, we are introducing The Ars Posting Guidelines Version 3.0. (The previous version of the Guidelines is archived here for comparison purposes, but again, the substance hasn't changed.)

We now outline the moderation process more clearly because it has caused some confusion in the past. As Captain Barbossa put it in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, "The Code is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules." Same thing here. Human judgment will always be used when it comes to interpreting infractions. We will, for instance, be much more patient with long-term members who have a history of good-faith posts but who sometimes have a bad day—but much less tolerant of brand-new posters who try to stir people up.

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The Trump administration yesterday sued three Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) board members who refused to leave their offices after President Trump fired them.

On April 28, the White House informed Democratic board members Laura Ross, Thomas Rothman, and Diane Kaplan that their board positions were "terminated effective immediately." Their departures would have left the board with only two members, both Republicans, but the CPB defied the president and continued with five board members.

The US government's lawsuit against Ross, Rothman, and Kaplan alleged that they "have been usurping and purporting to exercise unlawfully the office of board member of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting... As recent Supreme Court orders have recognized, the President cannot meaningfully exercise his executive power under Article II of the Constitution without the power to select—and, when necessary, remove—those who hold federal office."

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A Falcon 9 rocket launched from Florida's Space Coast overnight with a batch of Internet satellites for Amazon's Project Kuiper network, thrusting a rival one step closer to competing with SpaceX's Starlink broadband service.

Amazon's third set of operational Kuiper satellites lifted off at 2:30 am EST (06:30 UTC) on Wednesday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket arced downrange over the Atlantic Ocean, heading northeast to place its payload into the Kuiper constellation at an inclination of 51.9 degrees to the equator.

The Falcon 9's upper stage released the 24 Kuiper satellites about an hour after launch at an altitude of approximately 289 miles (465 kilometers). The satellites will use onboard electric propulsion to raise their orbits and reach their operating altitude of 391 miles (630 kilometers).

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There are countless Android-powered gaming handhelds, but they go beyond the usual slate of Android games by offering console emulation support. The problem is the game ROMs on these devices, which are not entirely legal. Italian YouTuber Once Were Nerd is learning how seriously some rightsholders are taking game piracy after agents from the country's Guardia di Finanza showed up to confiscate his consoles. He now says the investigation could lead to criminal charges and the end of his channel.

Once Were Nerd has produced YouTube content covering a plethora of gaming topics, including Android-based handheld game machines from the likes of Powkiddy and TrimUI. These devices usually run an older version of Android that has been heavily modified for gaming, featuring built-in emulation support for retro consoles like SNES, Nintendo 64, PlayStation Portable, GameCube, and more. They've become quite popular as the cost of mobile hardware has come down, making it possible to buy what is essentially an updated PSP or Game Boy Advance for $100 or less.

Recently, Once Were Nerd attracted the attention of Italy's Ministry of Economy and Finance, which is tasked with policing copyright in the country. In the video first spotted by Android Authority (which has an AI-generated English language track), the YouTuber explains that Guardia di Finanza appeared at his door in April with a search warrant.

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CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition is coming to the Mac this week, a few months after the port was announced as part of Apple’s M4 MacBook Pro introduction last fall. The good news for Mac gamers is that Cyberpunk will run on just about anything with Apple Silicon in it, going all the way back to the original M1 (though owners of the last few fading Intel Macs won’t be able to play it at all).

One hard-and-fast requirement for playability is at least 16GB of unified RAM. The 8GB versions of the M1, M2, and M3 don’t have the memory they need to play the game. Any Pro, Max, or Ultra chip of any generation will clear this requirement, so it’s only really a concern for buyers of lower-end Macs.

Users who want to play the game will also need to install the macOS 15.5 update, since the game won’t run on anything older. The game will also require 92GB of storage when downloaded from Steam, GOG, or the Epic Games Store and 159GB of storage when downloaded from the Mac App Store. The difference in size is because the App Store version “has all voiceovers included” and because Apple’s App Review guidelines (see section 2.4.5, item iv) prohibit apps from downloading additional files after the initial download is done.

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To paraphrase Mean Girls, "stop trying to make hydrogen happen."

For some years now, detractors of battery electric vehicles have held up hydrogen as a clean fuel panacea. That sometimes refers to hydrogen combustion engines, but more often, it's hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles, or FCEVs. Both promise motoring with only water emitted from the vehicles' exhausts. It's just that hydrogen actually kinda sucks as a fuel, and automaker Stellantis announced today that it is ending the development of its light-, medium- and heavy-duty FCEVs, which were meant to go into production later this year.

Hydrogen's main selling point is that it's faster to fill a tank with the stuff than it is to recharge a lithium-ion battery. So it's a seductive alternative that suggests a driver can keep all the convenience of their gasoline engine with none of the climate change-causing side effects.

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When the Switch 2 was fully unveiled back in April, we weren't alone in expecting the announcement of a true follow-up to Super Mario Odyssey—one of the original Switch's best-selling games and our pick for the best game of 2017. Instead, we got our first look at Donkey Kong Bananza, the big ape's first fully 3D adventure since the Rare-developed Donkey Kong 64 back in 1999.

The fact that Nintendo wasn't willing to commit its longstanding plumber mascot to its first first-party platformer on the Switch 2 could have been seen as a sign of a rushed, second-tier spin-off effort here. After playing through Donkey Kong Bananza, though, I'm happy to report nothing could be further from the truth for this deep and worthy spiritual successor to Super Mario Odyssey (from many of the same development staff). Donkey Kong Bananza captures the same sense of joyful movement and exploration as the best Mario games, while adding in an extremely satisfying terrain destruction system that shows off the Switch 2 hardware to great effect.

Beat up the earth

Its that terrain destruction system that most sets Donkey Kong Bananza from previous 3D platformers from Nintendo and others. Fully three of the four face buttons on the Switch 2 controllers are devoted to letting Donkey Kong punch either horizontally, upward, or downward, often taking out large chunks of the nearby scenery as he does.

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For a star, its initial mass is everything. It determines how quickly it burns through its hydrogen and how it will evolve once it starts fusing heavier elements. It's so well understood that scientists have devised a "main sequence" that acts a bit like a periodic table for stars, correlating their mass and age with their properties.

The main sequence, however, is based on an assumption that's almost always true: All of the energy involved comes from the gravity-driven fusion of lighter elements into heavier ones. However, three astrophysicists consider an alternative source of energy that may apply at the very center of our galaxy— energy released when dark matter particles and antiparticles collide and annihilate. While we don't even know that dark matter can do that, it's a hypothetical with some interesting consequences, like seemingly immortal stars, and others that move backward along the main sequence path.

Dark annihilations

We haven't figured out what dark matter is, but there are lots of reasons to think that it is comprised of elementary particles. And, if those behave like all of the particles we understand well, then there will be both regular and antimatter versions. Should those collide, they should annihilate each other, releasing energy in the process. Given dark matter's general propensity not to interact with anything, these collisions will be extremely rare except in locations with very high dark matter concentrations.

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Hackers are stashing malware in a place that’s largely out of the reach of most defenses—inside domain name system (DNS) records that map domain names to their corresponding numerical IP addresses.

The practice allows malicious scripts and early-stage malware to fetch binary files without having to download them from suspicious sites or attach them to emails, where they frequently get quarantined by antivirus software. That’s because traffic for DNS lookups often goes largely unmonitored by many security tools. Whereas web and email traffic is often closely scrutinized, DNS traffic largely represents a blind spot for such defenses.

A strange and enchanting place

Researchers from DomainTools on Tuesday said they recently spotted the trick being used to host a malicious binary for Joke Screenmate, a strain of nuisance malware that interferes with normal and safe functions of a computer. The file was converted from binary format into hexadecimal, an encoding scheme that uses the digits 0 through 9 and the letters A through F to represent binary values in a compact combination of characters.

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A budget-writing panel in the House of Representatives passed a $24.8 billion NASA budget bill Tuesday, joining a similar subcommittee in the Senate in maintaining the space agency's funding after the White House proposed a nearly 25 percent cut.

The budget bills making their way through the House and Senate don't specify funding levels for individual programs, but the topline numbers—$24.8 billion in the House version and $24.9 billion the Senate bill—represent welcome news for scientists, industry, and space enthusiasts bracing for severe cuts requested by the Trump administration.

The spending plan passed Tuesday by the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies covers NASA and numerous other federal agencies. The $24.8 billion budget the House seeks for NASA is $6 billion more than the Trump administration's budget proposal, and keeps NASA's funding next year the same as this year.

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Medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer twice made references to an early work featuring a Germanic mythological character named Wade. Only three lines survive, discovered buried in a sermon by a late 19th century scholar. There has been much debate over how to translate those fragments ever since, and whether the long-lost work was a monster-filled epic or a chivalric romance. Two Cambridge University scholars now say those lines have been "radically misunderstood" for 130 years, supplying their own translation—and argument in favor of a romance—in a new paper published in the Review of English Studies.

We know such a medieval work once existed because it's referenced in other texts, most notably by Chaucer. He alludes to the "tale of Wade" in his epic poem Troilus and Criseyde and mentions "Wade's boat [boot]" in The Merchant's Tale—part of his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales. A late 16th century editor of Chaucer's works, Thomas Speght, made a passing remark that Wade's boat was named "Guingelot," and that Wade's "strange exploits" were "long and fabulous," but didn't elaborate any further, no doubt assuming the tale was common knowledge and hence not worth retelling. Speght's truncated comment "has often been called the most exasperating note ever written on Chaucer," F.N. Robinson wrote in 1933.

So, the full story has been lost to history, although some remnant details have survived. For instance, there are mentions of Wade in an Old English poem, describing him as the son of a king and a "serpent-legged mermaid." The Poetic Edda mentions Wade's son, Wayland, as well as Wayland's brothers Egil and Slagfin. Wade is also briefly referenced in Malory's Morte D'Arthur and a handful of other texts from around the same period. Fun fact: J.R.R. Tolkien based his Middle-earth character Earendil on Wade; Earendil sails across the sky in a magical ship called Wingelot (or Vingilot).

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A sweeping analysis of health data from more than 1.2 million children in Denmark born over a 24-year period found no link between the small amounts of aluminum in vaccines and a wide range of health conditions—including asthma, allergies, eczema, autism, and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

The finding, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, firmly squashes a persistent anti-vaccine talking point that can give vaccine-hesitant parents pause.

Small amounts of aluminum salts have been added to vaccines for decades as adjuvants, that is, components of the vaccine that help drum up protective immune responses against a target germ. Aluminum adjuvants can be found in a variety of vaccines, including those against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), and hepatitis A and B.

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For more than two decades, hard drive manufacturer Seagate has been experimenting with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology for increasing hard drive density—drives that use tiny lasers to heat up and expand parts of the drive platter, write data, and then shut off to allow the platter to cool and contract, all within less than a nanosecond.

After decades of overly rosy availability predictions, Seagate announced in late 2024 that it was finally delivering HAMR-based drives with capacities of up to 36TB to some datacenter customers. Today, the drives are finally available for end users and individual IT administrators to buy, albeit only in smaller capacities for now. Seagate and other retailers will sell you massive 30TB IronWolf Pro and Exos M hard drives for $600, and 28TB drives for $570. Both drives use conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology, which performs better than the shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology sometimes used to increase disk density.

The drives are based on Seagate's Mosaic 3+ platform, which "incorporates Seagate’s unique implementation of HAMR to deliver mass-capacity storage at unprecedented areal densities of 3TB per disk and beyond."

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Chinese firms have begun rushing to order Nvidia's H20 AI chips as the company plans to resume sales to mainland China, Reuters reports. The chip giant expects to receive US government licenses soon so that it can restart shipments of the restricted processors just days after CEO Jensen Huang met with President Donald Trump, potentially generating $15 billion to $20 billion in additional revenue this year.

Nvidia said in a statement that it is filing applications with the US government to resume H20 sales and that "the US government has assured Nvidia that licenses will be granted, and Nvidia hopes to start deliveries soon."

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, Nvidia's financial trajectory has been linked to the demand for specialized hardware capable of executing AI models with maximum efficiency. Nvidia designed its data center GPU to perform the massive parallel computations required by neural networks, processing countless matrix operations simultaneously.

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I went for a run this morning while holding my iPhone, which was connected to a cable that attached to my earbuds. I’ve exercised with wired headphones for years, but today, the cord, with its persistent jostling, was especially distracting.

That’s because I was previously running with a pair of Bluetooth earbuds, EPOS’s GTW 270. They came out in 2021 for $200, and I received them as a gift. They typically sat in a drawer until this spring, when I started running outside (rather than in a gym or not at all) for the first time in a couple of years. Without a place to store my phone, wired headphones felt cumbersome while running. I previously overlooked the GTW 270 because they are not as comfortable as my wired earbuds and tend to lose their connection (especially with my PC) if the audio stops playing momentarily. The latter problem proved less common when using the earbuds with my phone, though. Suddenly, I was enamored with a gadget that had spent most of its life forgotten in a drawer.

But after a few short months, one of my earliest concerns about wireless earbuds was realized: I lost the GTW 270’s case, which charges the earbuds and enables pairing.

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More and more, we're seeing imaging technologies and machine learning showing up in automotive applications. It's usually to diagnose some kind of problem like quality control, although not always—the camera-based system by UVeye that we wrote about a few years ago made news recently after Hertz started using it to charge renters for things like scuffs on hubcaps. I have fewer concerns about customer abuse with General Motors' use of CT scanning, which simply seems like a clever adaptation of medical technology into another industry.

Ignore, if you can, GM's business decisions. Maybe you're upset because it killed your favorite brand,  changed the shape of the Corvette headlights, or abandoned Apple CarPlay. There are many valid reasons, but none change the fact that the company's engineers are quite creative. (That's probably why it stings so much when the company starts hacking things up.)

GM first turned to X-rays as a way of doing two-dimensional quality control on castings during the development process, according to Ed Duby, manufacturing engineering executive director at GM. "Much like the application to people, when you think about X-ray and CT scan, it's really trying to diagnose something without having to go into surgery. We kind of want to do the same thing with our castings," Duby told me.

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A week after Grok's antisemitic outburst, which included praise of Hitler and a post calling itself "MechaHitler," Elon Musk's xAI has landed a US military contract worth up to $200 million. xAI announced a "Grok for Government" service after getting the contract with the US Department of Defense.

The military's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) yesterday said that "awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI—each with a $200M ceiling—will enable the Department to leverage the technology and talent of US frontier AI companies to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas." While government grants typically take many months to be finalized, Grok's antisemitic posts didn't cause the Trump administration to change course before announcing the awards.

The US announcement didn't include much detail but said the four grants "to leading US frontier AI companies [will] accelerate Department of Defense (DoD) adoption of advanced AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges." The CDAO has been talking about grants for what it calls frontier AI since at least December 2024, when it said it would establish "partnerships with Frontier AI companies" and had identified "a need to accelerate Generative AI adoption across the DoD enterprise from analysts to warfighters to financial managers."

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It's "Crypto Week" in Congress, and experts continue to warn that legislation Donald Trump wants passed quickly could give the president ample opportunities to grift while leaving Americans more vulnerable to scams and financial ruin.

Perhaps most controversial of the bills is the one that's closest to reaching Trump's desk, the GENIUS Act, which creates a framework for banks and private companies to issue stablecoins. After passing in the Senate last month, the House of Representatives is hoping to hold a vote as soon as Thursday, insiders told Politico.

Stablecoins are often hyped as a more reliable form of cryptocurrency, considered the "cash of the blockchain" because their value can be pegged to the US dollar, Delicia Hand, Consumer Reports' senior director monitoring digital marketplaces, told Ars.

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