ars technica

Virgin Orbit’s Cosmic Girl, carrying the LauncherOne rocket, taking off from the UK’s Spaceport Cornwall.Photo: Ben Birchall (AP)After failing to reach orbit and deliver seven payloads on board, Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket fell back to Earth towards its fiery doom. The rocket’s hellish descent was captured on video, revealing the unfortunate journey back from space.Ramón López, an observer at the Spanish Meteor Network, caught the rocket reentering Earth’s atmosphere from Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands off the…

Photo: rarrarorro (Shutterstock)Not long after Elon Musk took over Twitter and started doing a whole lot of crazy stuff to the platform, the microblogging app Hive Social saw a huge spike in users. Apparently fed up with Elon’s shit, a bunch of people had decided to try out alternative social media sites—and Hive was one of them. Launched back in 2019, the platform reportedly saw its user base grow by a million users in the course of several weeks. Normally that kind of bump would have been cause for celebration, but…

Electric vehicles have never been more popular. Just about every automaker is in the midst of an electrification effort, spurred on by impending government regulations around the world aimed at reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. But is the movement having an effect? Here in the US, plug-in vehicles are selling better than ever, despite supply chain shortages and frequent hefty dealership markups.According to Argonne National Lab, between 2010 and the end of 2021, more than 2.1 million plug-in vehicles were sold in…

The programming’s been on the wall for a while, but yesterday, as reported by fan sites like Brick Fanatics and Brickset, Lego announced that it will be discontinuing its Mindstorms robotics lineup at the end of the year, and only guaranteeing support for the accompanying mobile apps, where the robots can be controlled and programmed, for another two years after that.Lego Mindstorms first debuted back in September of 1998, over 24 years ago, leveraging the company’s more complicated Technics building pieces, featuring…

Artist’s conception of a Starship spacecraft passing by the Moon.Image: SpaceXSpaceX has yet to send Starship to orbit, but that’s not stopping the company from selling rides aboard the future megarocket. Dennis and Akiko Tito are the first passengers announced for SpaceX’s second commercial spaceflight around the Moon. The pair, along with 10 others, will fly aboard the company’s Starship on a trajectory that will take the spacecraft through cislunar space. No date has been set for the mission, as a fully stacked…

This image was downloadable off Shutterstock and labeled as AI-generated. The platform has struggled to come up with a comprehensive policy for AI-generated images on their site.Image: teh_z1b (Shutterstock)Whether you think they’re legitimate artistic creations or artistically derivative and plagiaristic, AI-generated images exist in a strange legal limbo that no governmental body has yet to disentangle. Yet one artist may be breaking new ground while opening up an even bigger can of worms for ownership in our…

Unfortunately for one Twitter-based AI bot, users found that a simple exploit in its code can force it to say anything they want.Photo: Patrick Daxenbichler (Shutterstock)Have you ever wanted to gaslight an AI? Well, now you can, and it doesn’t take much more knowhow than a few strings of text. One Twitter-based bot is finding itself at the center of a potentially devastating exploit that has some AI researchers and developers equal parts bemused and concerned.As first noticed by Ars Technica, users realized they could…

macOS comes with malware scanning built in.Image: AppleWhile macOS has a strong reputation for keeping your computer and your data safe from harm, it doesn’t have a visible antivirus tool like the Windows Security suite that comes as part of Microsoft’s desktop operating system. In fact, there are antivirus and security tools built into the software on your Mac—they’re just not as noticeable.Take XProtect, for example. It won’t appear in the dock, or in the launcher, or if you search for it through Spotlight, but it’s…

Disgraced ecigarette maker Juul has agreed to pay $438.5 million to 33 states and Puerto Rico to settle an investigation into whether the vaping giant deceptively marketed its products and intentionally targeted children and teens, who are most vulnerable to nicotine addiction.The mammoth settlement comes as the company continues its fight for survival with the US Food and Drug Administration. In June, the FDA made the dramatic move of denying marketing authorization for all Juul products, effectively forcing the…

Transportation produces about a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, and passenger vehicles account for over half that figure. As such, nearly every plan for future emissions cuts includes some variant of getting people out of internal-combustion vehicles—typically into electric versions of the same vehicle. But a couple of countries have managed an alternate route to lower emissions: Denmark and the Netherlands both have bicycle-focused transportation that gets many people out of cars entirely.An…