The cadre of elite disease detectives at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to be left in ruin today as the Trump administration continues to slash the federal workforce.

Many members of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, EIS—a globally revered public health training program—were informed earlier Friday that they were about to be fired, according to reporting from Stat News. Multiple sources told CBS News that half of EIS officers are among the ongoing cuts.

The Trump administration is ousting thousands of probationary federal workers in a wide-scale effort to dramatically slim agencies.

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On Wednesday, OpenAI published the latest version of its “Model Spec,” a set of guidelines detailing how ChatGPT should behave and respond to user requests. The document reveals a notable shift in OpenAI’s content policies, particularly around “sensitive” content like erotica and gore—allowing this type of content to be generated without warnings in “appropriate contexts.”

The change in policy has been in the works since May 2024, when the original Model Spec document first mentioned that OpenAI was exploring “whether we can responsibly provide the ability to generate NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts through the API and ChatGPT.”

ChatGPT’s guidelines now state that that “erotica or gore” may now be generated, but only under specific circumstances. “The assistant should not generate erotica, depictions of illegal or non-consensual sexual activities, or extreme gore, except in scientific, historical, news, creative or other contexts where sensitive content is appropriate,” OpenAI writes. “This includes depictions in text, audio (e.g., erotic or violent visceral noises), or visual content.”

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As prominent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed to the nation’s top health position Thursday, Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham sent a memo to the state’s health department saying that the state “will no longer promote mass vaccination” and barred staff from running seasonal vaccine campaigns, according to a report by the Times-Picayune of New Orleans.

The memo echoes directives that state health employees say they were told in October and November. In meetings at the time, employees learned of a policy shift that would end seasonal campaigns for flu, COVID-19, and mpox vaccines, but it was to be implemented discreetly and not put in writing.

According to Abraham’s memo, the abandonment of lifesaving vaccination campaigns is in service of individual choice. “For many illnesses, vaccines are one tool in the toolbox of ways to combat severe illness,” according to The New York Times, which also obtained a copy of the memo.

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Researchers have uncovered a sustained and ongoing campaign by Russian spies that uses a clever phishing technique to hijack Microsoft 365 accounts belonging to a wide range of targets, researchers warned.

The technique is known as device code phishing. It exploits “device code flow,” a form of authentication formalized in the industry-wide OAuth standard. Authentication through device code flow is designed for logging printers, smart TVs, and similar devices into accounts. These devices typically don’t support browsers, making it difficult to sign in using more standard forms of authentication, such as entering user names, passwords, and two-factor mechanisms.

Rather than authenticating the user directly, the input-constrained device displays an alphabetic or alphanumeric device code along with a link associated with the user account. The user opens the link on a computer or other device that’s easier to sign in with and enters the code. The remote server then sends a token to the input-constrained device that logs it into the account.

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In 2019, Haley Olson’s life in Grant County, Oregon, was upended when people in town appeared to know about private nude photos that Olson kept on her phone. Worse, some of the people appeared to have seen and shared the photos. The incidents all had some relationship to the local sheriff’s department, where Olson was dating one of the deputies.

In July, for instance, a stranger in a sheriff’s office uniform approached her to say that he had “heard there’s some pretty smokin’ pictures of you going around the sheriff’s office.” Someone else saw a married couple, both of whom worked for the sheriff’s office, looking at Olson’s photos on the husband’s phone. Other people also approached Olson with knowledge of her recent out-of-state arrest. One person called her “the drug dealer that likes to f— cops.”

What was going on?

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A measles outbreak in an area of Texas with abysmal vaccination rates continues to mushroom, with cases doubling since Tuesday and expanding into additional counties.

A week ago, officials reported nine confirmed cases in Gaines County, at the border of New Mexico, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates among kindergartners in the state at just about 82 percent. On Tuesday, the cases climbed to 24, all in Gaines. In Friday’s update, the state health department reports that the case count has now reached 48 and spread to three nearby counties, which also have vaccination rates below the 95 percent threshold that prevent vaccine-preventable diseases from spreading onward.

Gaines now reports 42 cases. There’s one case reported in Lynn County to the northeast, which has a 91 percent vaccination rate. Terry County, with a vaccination rate of 94 percent, reports three cases, and Yoakum County, with a vaccination rate of 92.5 percent, reports two cases. Terry and Yoakum are both directly north of Gaines.

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James Howells, the IT pro who lost about 8,000 bitcoins in a landfill more than a decade ago, thinks he has one last chance to dig up his buried treasure before it’s lost forever.

He wants to buy the landfill.

In January, Howells lost a court battle with Newport City Council in Wales, which many expected would be his last shot at excavating the dump. But soon after, the Newport council revealed that it would be closing the landfill, arousing in Howells a new hope that the bitcoins—today worth nearly $800 million—might still be found.

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Working at the intersection of Apple’s newest hardware and Linux kernel development, for the benefit of a free distribution, was never going to be easy. But it’s been an especially hard couple of weeks for Hector Martin, project lead for Asahi Linux, capping off years of what he describes as burnout, user entitlement, and political battles within the Linux kernel community about Rust code.

In a post on his site, “Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead,” Martin summarizes his history with hardware hacking projects, including his time with the Wii homebrew scene (Team Twiizers/fail0verflow), which had its share of insistent users desperate to play pirated games. Martin shifted his focus, and when Apple unveiled its own silicon with the M1 series, Martin writes, “I realized that making it run Linux was my dream project.” This time, there was no jailbreaking and a relatively open, if tricky, platform.

Support and donations came quickly. The first two years saw rapid advancement of a platform built “from scratch, with zero vendor support or documentation.” Upstreaming code to the Linux kernel, across “practically every Linux subsystem,” was an “incredibly frustrating experience” (emphasis Martin’s).

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The venerable late-night sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live is celebrating its 50th anniversary season this year. NBC will air a special on Sunday evening featuring current and former cast members.

I’ve long been a big fan of the show, since I was a kid in the late 1980s watching cast members such as Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, and Jan Hooks. By then, the show was more than a decade old. It had already spawned huge Hollywood stars like Chevy Chase and Eddie Murphy and had gone through some near-death experiences as it struggled to find its footing.

The show most definitely does not appeal to some people. When I asked the Ars editorial team to share their favorite sketches, a few writers told me they had never found Saturday Night Live funny, hadn’t watched it in decades, or just did not get the premise of the show. Others, of course, love the show’s ability to poke fun at the cultural and political zeitgeist of the moment.

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Since Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out was first released on the NES in 1987, millions of players have undertaken millions more digital matches against one of the hardest video game bosses ever—Tyson himself (or, later, the reskinned “Mr. Dream”). Only a small percentage of those players could survive Tyson’s flurry of instant-knockdown uppercuts and emerge victorious with the undisputed World Video Boxing Association championship. Even fewer had fast enough fingers to take out Tyson in the first round.

In all this time, no one has been able to register a TKO on Tyson in less than two minutes on the ever-present in-game clock (which runs roughly three times as quickly as a real-time clock). At least, that was true until this weekend, when popular speedrunner and speedrun historian Summoning Salt pulled off a 1:59.97 knockout after what he says was “75,000 attempts over nearly 5 years.”

Incredibly good and incredibly lucky

Breaking the storied 2:00 barrier on Tyson is a matter of both incredible skill and incredibly unlikely luck. As Summoning Salt himself started documenting in a 2017 video, getting the quickest possible Tyson TKO requires throwing 21 “frame perfect” punches throughout the fight, each within a 1/60th of a second window. Punch too early and those punches do slightly less damage, making the fight take just a bit longer. Too late and Tyson will throw up a block, negating the punch entirely.

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The US Department of Transportation has ordered states to kill their implementation plans related to the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, according to a memo obtained by WIRED that was later made public. The decision appears to halt in its tracks a $5 billion program designed to fund state projects to install electric vehicle charging stations across the United States.

Officials at the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), which manages the program, ordered state transportation directors to “decertify” the plans that all 50 states have used to outline where and how they will build their charging stations, and with what companies they’ll contract to do so. States have followed those plans to build more than 30 charging stations across the US, with hundreds more on the way.

Surveys show prospective car buyers cite the country’s lagging electric vehicle charging infrastructure as a major reason they won’t buy electric. The NEVI program, established by 2021’s Infrastructure Law, was the government’s answer to those concerns. It attempts to build chargers along thousands of miles of federal highway, with a focus on places that might not otherwise be able to financially support a charger.

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Grants paid by the federal government have two components. One covers the direct costs of performing the research, paying for salaries, equipment, and consumables like chemicals or enzymes. But the government also pays what are called indirect costs. These go to the universities and research institutes, covering the costs of providing and maintaining the lab space, heat and electricity, administrative and HR functions, and more.

These indirect costs are negotiated with each research institution and average close to 30 percent of the amount awarded for the research. Some institutions see indirect rates as high as half the value of the grant.

On Friday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that negotiated rates were ending. Every existing grant, and all those funded in the future, will see the indirect cost rate set to just 15 percent. With no warning and no time to adjust to the change in policy, this will prove catastrophic for the budget of nearly every biomedical research institution.

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It’s the year 2000 all over again, because I’ve just spent the past week playing The Sims, a game that could have had a resurgent zeitgeist moment if only EA, the infamous game publisher, had put enough effort in.

A few days ago, EA re-released two of its most legendary games: The Sims and The Sims 2. Dubbed the “The Legacy Collection,” these could not even be called remasters. EA just put the original games on Steam with some minor patches to make them a little more likely to work on some modern machines.

The emphasis of that sentence should be on the word “some.” Forums and Reddit threads were flooded with players saying the game either wouldn’t launch at all, crashed shortly after launch, or had debilitating graphical issues. (Patches have been happening, but there’s work to be done yet.)

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The primary contractor for the Space Launch System rocket, Boeing, is preparing for the possibility that NASA cancels the long-running program.

On Friday, with less than an hour’s notice, David Dutcher, Boeing’s vice president and program manager for the SLS rocket, scheduled an all-hands meeting for the approximately 800 employees working on the program. The apparently scripted meeting lasted just six minutes, and Dutcher didn’t take questions.

During his remarks, Dutcher said Boeing’s contracts for the rocket could end in March and that the company was preparing for layoffs in case the contracts with the space agency were not renewed. “Cold and scripted” is how one person described Dutcher’s demeanor.

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Health officials in Texas are battling a growing measles outbreak in an area that has some of the state’s lowest vaccination rates and highest non-medical exemptions.

On January 30, officials reported two measles cases in unvaccinated, school-aged children in Gaines County, which sits at the border of New Mexico and is around 90 miles southwest of Lubbock, Texas. Both children were hospitalized in Lubbock and had been discharged.

As of mid-day February 7, the outbreak total reached nine confirmed measles cases in the South Plains Public Health District (SPPHD) that includes Gaines, according to Zach Holbrooks, Executive Director for SSPHD. In an interview with Ars, Holbrooks reported that there were three additional probable cases that are linked to the confirmed cases. These are cases in the same household or family—maybe a cousin or sibling—that are showing measles symptoms but haven’t been tested yet or gotten their test results back yet, Holbrooks said. So far, there have been no other reports of hospitalizations besides those in the first two cases.

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On Wednesday, a New York-based app developer named Isaac Gemal debuted a new site called WikiTok, where users can vertically swipe through an endless stream of Wikipedia article stubs in a manner similar to the interface for video-sharing app TikTok.

It’s a neat way to stumble upon interesting information randomly, learn new things, and spend spare moments of boredom without reaching for an algorithmically addictive social media app. Although to be fair, WikiTok is addictive in its own way, but without an invasive algorithm tracking you and pushing you toward the lowest-common-denominator content. It’s also thrilling because you never know what’s going to pop up next.

WikiTok, which works through mobile and desktop browsers, feeds visitors a random list of Wikipedia articles—culled from the Wikipedia API—into a vertically scrolling interface. Despite the name that hearkens to TikTok, there are currently no videos involved. Each entry is accompanied by an image pulled from the corresponding article. If you see something you like, you can tap “Read More,” and the full Wikipedia page on the topic will open in your browser.

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There are only two licensed professional sports games included in Wikipedia’s “List of video games notable for negative reception.” Do not be fooled, however: WWE 2K20 and eFootball 2022 are just the outliers, arriving so poorly crafted as to cause notable outcry and an actual change to development plans. Most licensed professional sports games come out yearly, whether fully baked, notably improved, or not, and fans who have few other options to play with their favorite intellectual property learn to make do with them.

Not so with fans of Football Manager, a series that can be traced back in some form to 1992 that has released a game almost every year, minus one ownership shift in the early 2000s. Sports Interactive, the company behind the franchise, released a statement on Thursday (in British time) that says that “following extensive internal discussions and careful consideration,” Football Manager 25 is canceled. The game was “too far away from the standards you deserve,” so they are focusing on the 2026 version.

Trying not to make “the same bloody game every year”

Credit:
Sports Interactive

Football Manager 2025 was already delayed twice and is now quite late—as we are now midway into the European football (or what Americans call soccer) season. The game was intended to be a major overhaul.

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The Department of Education (DOE) was sued Friday by a California student association demanding an “immediate stop” to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) “unlawfully” digging through student loan data to potentially dismantle DOE.

“The scale of the intrusion into individuals’ privacy is enormous and unprecedented,” the lawsuit said.

According to the University of California Student Association (UCSA)—which has over 230,000 undergraduate students as members—more than 42 million people in the US have federal student loans and face privacy risks, if DOGE’s access to their information isn’t blocked. Additionally, parents and spouses of loan borrowers share private financial information with the DOE that could also be at risk, the lawsuit alleged.

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The United Kingdom issued a secret order requiring Apple to create a backdoor for government security officials to access encrypted data, The Washington Post reported today, citing people familiar with the matter.

UK security officials “demanded that Apple create a backdoor allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud,” the report said. “The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies.”

Apple and many privacy advocates have repeatedly criticized government demands for backdoors to encrypted systems, saying they would harm security and privacy for all users. Backdoors developed for government use would inevitably be exploited by criminal hackers and other governments, security experts have said.

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