Enlarge / Dispensers for Charged Lemondade, a caffeinated lemonade drink, at Panera Bread, Walnut Creek, California, March 27, 2023. (credit: Getty | Smith Collection/Gado)

According to a lawsuit filed by family members Monday, 46-year-old Dennis Brown fell dead on a sidewalk from cardiac arrest while walking home from a Panera in Florida on October 9. Before he left the restaurant, he had ordered a Charged Lemonade and had two refills.

In September, college student Sarah Katz, 21, went into cardiac arrest after drinking a Charged Lemonade from a Panera in Philadelphia. Katz had a heart condition called long QT syndrome type 1 and had avoided energy drinks because of it, according to a lawsuit filed in October by her family.

Enlarge / Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator and co-chairman of OpenAI, seen here in July 2016. (credit: Drew Angerer / Getty Images News)

When Sam Altman was suddenly removed as CEO of OpenAI—before being reinstated days later—the company’s board publicly justified the move by saying Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” In the days since, there has been some reporting on potential reasons for the attempted board coup, but not much in the way of follow-up on what specific information Altman was allegedly less than “candid” about.

Now, in an in-depth piece for The New Yorker, writer Charles Duhigg—who was embedded inside OpenAI for months on a separate story—suggests that some board members found Altman “manipulative and conniving” and took particular issue with the way Altman allegedly tried to manipulate the board into firing fellow board member Helen Toner.

Board “manipulation” or “ham-fisted” maneuvering?

Toner, who serves as director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, allegedly drew Altman’s negative attention by co-writing a paper on different ways AI companies can “signal” their commitment to safety through “costly” words and actions. In the paper, Toner contrasts OpenAI’s public launch of ChatGPT last year with Anthropic’s “deliberate deci[sion] not to productize its technology in order to avoid stoking the flames of AI hype.”

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Benj Edwards)

In an editorial for Slate published Monday, renowned security researcher Bruce Schneier warned that AI models may enable a new era of mass spying, allowing companies and governments to automate the process of analyzing and summarizing large volumes of conversation data, fundamentally lowering barriers to spying activities that currently require human labor.

In the piece, Schneier notes that the existing landscape of electronic surveillance has already transformed the modern era, becoming the business model of the Internet, where our digital footprints are constantly tracked and analyzed for commercial reasons. Spying, by contrast, can take that kind of economically inspired monitoring to a completely new level:

“Spying and surveillance are different but related things,” Schneier writes. “If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations. If I hired that same private detective to put you under surveillance, I would get a different report: where you went, whom you talked to, what you purchased, what you did.”

Enlarge / Myth: You own the digital content you buy. (credit: MythBusters/YouTube)

The company recently announced that all Discovery content purchased on the PlayStation Store will be erased before 2024. The brief notice, signed by the PlayStation Store, says:

As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library.

We sincerely thank you for your continued support.

PlayStation Network started selling TV shows and movies with 2008’s PlayStation 3, and at the time you were allowed to transfer content to different Sony devices, Kotaku noted. That feature went away with the PlayStation 4. With the growth of streaming TV apps, many of which could be accessed through a PlayStation, the PlayStation Store stopped selling movies and TV shows in 2021.

The OnePlus is doing its usual early flagship launch in China. The OnePlus 12 is official there, but won’t be released in the US until 2024. We can still fire up Google Translate and go over it, though.

This will be one of the first devices on the market with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, Qualcomm’s new SoC for 2024. This uses an Arm Cortex X4 CPU and a novel 1:5:2 core arrangement, all built on a 4 nm process. That’s one big X4 core, five “medium” A720 cores, and two A530 cores for background processing. The base model has 12GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, while higher tiers will let you go up to 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. The phone is only IP65 rated for dust and water resistance; in other words, it can’t be submerged in water like most other flagships.

The battery is getting a big boost beyond the usual 5000 mAh capacity phones have been stuck at for years and is now up to 5400 mAh. The Chinese version has 100 W wired quick charging (this will probably be downgraded to 80 W in the US) and sees the return of 50 W wireless charging. Both will need proprietary OnePlus chargers. The display is a 6.82-inch, 3168×1440 120 Hz OLED that can hit 4,500 nit peak brightness. Unlike some other flagships that are dumping curved displays, this one is still curved.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

AI face detection now counts among the tools that could be used to help adult sites effectively estimate UK user ages and block minors from accessing pornography, the UK’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) said in a press release on Tuesday.

The only foreseeable problem, Ofcom noted: There’s little evidence that the AI method of age estimation will be fair, reliable, or effective.

The UK’s legal age to watch porn is 18. To enforce that restriction, under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom will soon require all apps and sites displaying adult content to introduce so-called “age assurance” systems that verify and/or estimate user ages. Sites and apps risk potential fines if they fail to “ensure that children are not normally able to encounter pornography on their service.”

Enlarge / The Fiat 500e returns to the US early in 2024. (credit: Fiat)

We’ve known for some time that the 500e was US-bound; Fiat broke that news in 2022. But it’s now released a lot more information on the 500e, which is coming here at first as a (RED) edition, meaning it might match your iPhone or iPod. Fiat says it’s incorporating a “product drop” strategy, so expect other special editions accompanied by as much hype as the automaker can generate, presumably.

Regarding specs, it looks like Fiat used the Mini Cooper SE as the benchmark and then set out to beat it in various attributes. The 500e has a curb weight of 2,952 lbs (1,342 kg), which Fiat says makes it the lightest passenger EV in the segment, so it’s about one small adult lighter than the Mini.

Enlarge / “Oobleck” is a classic kitchen science example of a shear-thickening non-Newtonian fluid. (credit: Screenshot/PBS)

Oobleck has long been my favorite example of a non-Newtonian fluid, and I’m not alone. It’s a hugely popular “kitchen science” experiment because it’s simple and easy to make. Mix one part water to two parts corn starch, add a dash of food coloring for fun, and you’ve got oobleck, which behaves as either a liquid or a solid, depending on how much stress is applied. Stir it slowly and steadily, and it’s a liquid. Punch it hard, and it turns more solid under your fist. You can even fill small pools with the stuff and walk across it since the oobleck will harden every time you step down—a showy physics demo that naturally shows up a lot on YouTube.

The underlying physics principles of this simple substance are surprisingly nuanced and complex, and thus fascinating to scientists. Molecular engineers at the University of Chicago have used dense suspensions of piezoelectric nanoparticles to measure what is happening at the molecular level when oobleck transitions from liquid to solid behavior, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Toward the end of his life, Isaac Newton laid out the properties of an “ideal liquid.” One of those properties is viscosity, loosely defined as how much friction/resistance there is to flow in a given substance. The friction arises because a flowing liquid is essentially a series of layers sliding past one another. The faster one layer slides over another, the more resistance there is; the slower one layer slides over another, the less resistance there is. But the world is not an ideal place.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

“I don’t think the hardware is ready and the software is ready,” ex-Tesla employee Lukasz Krupski said. “It affects all of us because we are essentially experiments in public roads. So even if you don’t have a Tesla, your children still walk in the footpath.”

The nonprofit group Blueprint for Free Speech recently awarded Krupski with its Whistleblowing Prize. “In late 2021, Lukasz realised that—even as a service technician—he had access to a shockingly wide range of internal data at Tesla,” the group’s prize announcement said. “Not only did access controls seem almost entirely absent, other lapses were evident in the data Lukasz was seeing: serious lapses that risked putting Tesla’s customers, and those sharing the roads with them, in danger.” Those safety risks included sudden accelerations and braking.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

As it has done for other stubbornly popular versions of Windows, though, Microsoft is offering a reprieve for those who want or need to stay on Windows 10: three additional years of security updates, provided to those who can pay for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program.

The initial announcement, written by Windows Servicing and Delivery Principal Product Manager Jason Leznek, spends most of its time encouraging users and businesses to upgrade to Windows 11 rather than staying on 10, either by updating their current computers, upgrading to new PCs or transitioning to a Windows 365 cloud-based PC instead.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Benj Edwards)

On Tuesday, IBM and Meta announced the AI Alliance, an international coalition of over 50 organizations including AMD, Intel, NASA, CERN, and Harvard University that aims to advance “open innovation and open science in AI.” In other words, the goal is to collectively promote alternatives to closed AI systems currently in use by market leaders such as OpenAI and Google with ChatGPT and Duet.

In the AI Alliance news release, OpenAI isn’t mentioned by name—and OpenAI is not part of the alliance, nor is Google. But over the past year, clear battle lines have been drawn between companies like OpenAI that keep AI model weights (neural network files) and data about how the models are created to themselves and companies like Meta, which provide AI model weights for others to run on their own hardware and allow others to build derivative models based on their research.

“Open and transparent innovation is essential to empower a broad spectrum of AI researchers, builders, and adopters with the information and tools needed to harness these advancements in ways that prioritize safety, diversity, economic opportunity and benefits to all,” writes the alliance.

Enlarge (credit: TrevorJacob | YouTube)

Trevor Jacob, a 30-year-old YouTuber pilot who intentionally crashed his plane to drive up views on a sponsored video, has been sentenced to six months in federal prison, the US Attorney’s Office announced Monday.

Earlier this year, Jacob pled guilty to “deliberately” crashing the plane, destroying the plane wreckage, and repeatedly lying to officials, obstructing federal probes into the crash. His sentence is much lower than the maximum sentence of 20 years that he may have faced had he not accepted a plea deal.

An “experienced pilot, skydiver, and former Olympic athlete,” Jacob hatched his plot to crash the plane after a company agreed to sponsor a video in which Jacob would promote a wallet, the US Attorney’s Office said.

Enlarge / That “Coming 2025” probably won’t apply to any PC version. (credit: Rockstar)

PC players will likely have to wait a bit longer than their console counterparts to play the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI. In a press release accompanying last night’s earlier-than-scheduled trailer launch, Rockstar specifically says it is “proud to announce that Grand Theft Auto VI is coming to PlayStation 5 computer entertainment systems and Xbox Series X|S games and entertainment systems in 2025.”

The explicit lack of any immediate PC release plans in that statement shouldn’t be a shock to longtime Rockstar Games watchers. Sure, the 2D, top-down Grand Theft Auto actually launched on Windows and MS-DOS(!) a few months before the more popular port to PlayStation in 1998. And the game’s 1999 sequel debuted on PlayStation and Windows on the same day.

When it comes to major 3D releases, Rockstar clearly prioritizes console launches over PC ports.

Since 2000, though, Rockstar has clearly prioritized its console releases over any PC ports. When one of Rockstar’s console games is released on the PC, the port tends to come anywhere from five months to over two full years after the first console release, according to an Ars analysis. Even Grand Theft Auto DLC like “The Lost and the Damned” and “The Ballad of Gay Tony” hit the PC well after their console launches—420 days and 166 days, respectively.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | kontekbrothers)

Support in Congress is growing for intensified vetting procedures at the US border, which would see immigrants and foreign visitors subjected to the same levels of scrutiny as suspected terrorists and spies. A bill introduced last week by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI) and forthcoming legislation from its House counterpart both aim to expand the use of a key foreign intelligence program—Section 702—for screening and vetting visitors to the US.

Enlarge / A Pixel 3, messaging a savvy iPhone owner, one with the kinds of concerns Beeper hopes to resolve for its customers. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Sending an iMessage without an Apple device isn’t entirely new, but this way of doing it is. I didn’t hand over my Apple credentials or log in with my Apple ID on a Mac server on some far-away rack. I put my primary SIM card in the Pixel, I installed Beeper Mini, and it sent a text message to register my number with Apple. I never gave Beeper Mini my Apple ID.

From then on, my iPhone-toting friends who sent messages to my Pixel 3 saw them as other-iPhone blue, not noticeably distracting green. We could all access the typing, delivered/read receipts, emoji reactions, and most other iPhone-to-iPhone message features. Even if I had no active Apple devices, it seems, I could have chosen to meet Apple users where they were and gain end-to-end encryption by doing so.

Enlarge / India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar spacecraft undergoes accoustic testing. The propulsion module can be seen at the bottom. (credit: ISRO)

A little more than three months ago the Indian space agency, ISRO, achieved a major success by putting its Vikram lander safely down on the surface of the Moon. In doing so India became the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon, and this further ignited the country’s interest in space exploration.

But it turns out that is not the end of the story for the Chandrayaan 3 mission. In a surprise announcement made Monday, ISRO announced that it has successfully returned the propulsion module used by the spacecraft into a high orbit around Earth. This experimental phase of the mission, the agency said in a statement, tested key capabilities needed for future lunar missions, including the potential for returning lunar rocks to Earth.

A capable module

The primary task of the propulsion module was to deliver the Vikram 3 lander into a low-lunar orbit, 100 km above the surface of the Moon. After doing this in August, the propulsion module moved to an orbit around the Moon at an altitude of 150 km. There, its remaining operational goal was to support a science experiment, known as SHAPE, to observe the Earth.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

But bear in mind, all cars lose range in the winter. Air gets denser as it cools, which takes more work to push through. And all the viscous fluids vehicles need take more time to warm up to their respective operating temperatures. And that means your engine, transmission, and differential all have more work to do—requiring more energy—in the cold.

Enlarge / Color composite of galaxy AzTECC71 from multiple color filters in the NIRCam instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope. (credit: J. McKinney/M. Franco/C. Casey/The University of Texas at Austin)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.