Enlarge / “Coming 2025.” (credit: Rockstar Games / YouTube)

The trailer for Rockstar Games heavily, mightily, impossibly anticipated sequel in its record-breaking series landed on YouTube Monday evening, earlier than its previously published Tuesday morning release. That’s because a pop-up, quickly suspended X (formerly Twitter) account posted it early, and Rockstar rushed to get its official version out, ending with a “Coming 2025” notice.

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Enlarge / A crescent Earth rises over the horizon of the Moon in this view from NASA’s Orion spacecraft on the unpiloted Artemis I test flight in December 2022. (credit: NASA)

“NASA and its contractors have made progress, including completing several important milestones, but they still face multiple challenges with development of the human landing system and the space suits,” the GAO said in a report published Thursday. “As a result, GAO found that the Artemis III crewed lunar landing is unlikely to occur in 2025.”

Enlarge / Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. (credit: Getty | Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle)

The lawsuit also blames Pfizer for not ending the pandemic after the vaccine’s release in December 2020. “Contrary to Pfizer’s public statements, however, the pandemic did not end; it got worse” in 2021, the complaint reads.

“We are pursuing justice for the people of Texas, many of whom were coerced by tyrannical vaccine mandates to take a defective product sold by lies,” Paxton said in a press release. “The facts are clear. Pfizer did not tell the truth about their COVID-19 vaccines.”

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

This is a much larger number of accounts than 23andMe previously disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, which estimated that 0.1 percent of users—approximately 14,000, TechCrunch estimated—had accounts accessed by hackers using compromised passwords.

After the cyberattack was reported, Wired estimated that “at least a million data points from 23andMe accounts” that were “exclusively about Ashkenazi Jews” and data points from “hundreds of thousands of users of Chinese descent” seemed to be exposed. But beyond those estimates, for two months, all the public knew was that 23andMe’s filing noted that “a significant number of files containing profile information about other users’ ancestry” were also accessed.

Enlarge / AMD’s Radeon RX 7600. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It’s been an up-and-down decade for most consumer technology, with a pandemic-fueled boom in PC sales giving way to a sales crater that the market is still gradually recovering from. But few components have had as hard a time as gaming graphics cards, which were near impossible to buy at reasonable prices for about two years and then crashed hard as GPU companies responded with unattainable new high-end products.

According to the GPU sales analysts at Jon Peddie Research, things may finally be evening out. Its data shows that GPU shipments have returned to quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year growth after two years of shrinking sales. This is the second consecutive quarter this has happened, which “strongly indicates that things are finally on the upswing for the graphics industry.”

JPR reports that overall GPU unit shipments (which include integrated and dedicated GPUs) are up 16.8 percent from Q2 and 36.6 percent from a year ago. Dedicated GPU sales increased 37.4 percent from Q2. When comparing year-over-year numbers, the biggest difference is that Nvidia, AMD, and Intel all have current-generation GPUs available in the $200–$300 range, including the GeForce RTX 4060, the Radeon RX 7600, and the Arc A770 and A750, all of which were either unavailable or newly launched in Q3 of 2022.

Enlarge (credit: zhihao | Moment)

Amazon hoped the court would dismiss the suit, arguing that the platform wasn’t responsible for the alleged criminal conduct harming the minor. But after nearly eight months deliberating, a judge recently largely denied the tech giant’s motion to dismiss.

Enlarge / Michael Keaton in The Flash, which is streaming on Max. (credit: YouTube/Warner Bros.)

Streaming services are on thin ice with many customers. With price hikes becoming a norm for streaming services, subscribers are reconsidering the value of streaming apps and whether subscriptions are worth the cost. In a bid to mollify disgruntled customers and make their packages seem more economical and simple, streaming services are bundling up.

Verizon announced today that its myPlan wireless phone customers will be able to get Netflix and Max, both with ads, for $10 per month total per phone line. Netflix with ads is usually $6.99 per month, while Max’s ad tier is $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year. That means Verizon customers can save up to $6.98 per month with the new bundle, which Verizon will begin offering on December 7.

The new offer joins two other deals that Verizon already offers that bundle its wireless service with TV streaming. One lets customers add ad-free Disney+ and Hulu and ESPN with ads for $10 per month per line. Another lets customers add Apple One, which includes Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, and iCloud+, for $10 per month per line.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | pagadesign)

The latest post on the Google Security blog details a new upgrade to Gmail’s spam filters that Google is calling “one of the largest defense upgrades in recent years.” The upgrade comes in the form of a new text classification system called RETVec (Resilient & Efficient Text Vectorizer). Google says this can help understand “adversarial text manipulations”—these are emails full of special characters, emojis, typos, and other junk characters that previously were legible by humans but not easily understandable by machines. Previously, spam emails full of special characters made it through Gmail’s defenses easily.

If you want an example of what “adversarial text manipulation” looks like, the below message is something from my spam folder. My personal Gmail experience with these emails is that they used to be a major problem during the 1st half of the year, with emails like this regularly landing in my inbox. It does seem like this RETVec tech upgrade really works, though, because emails like this haven’t been a problem at all for me in the last few months.

An example of “adversarial text manipulation” from my spam folder. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

The reason emails like this have been so difficult to classify is that, while any spam filter could probably swat down an email that says “Congratulations! A balance of $1000 is available for your jackpot account,” that’s not what this email actually says. A big portion of the letters here are “homoglyphs“—by diving into the endless depths of the Unicode standard, you can find obscure characters that look like they’re part of the normal Latin alphabet but actually aren’t.

Enlarge / A Vega rocket rides a column of exhaust from its solid-fueled first stage, kicking off a mission to deliver 12 small satellites into orbit. (credit: ESA/CNES/Arianespace)

The European Spaceflight newsletter reports that two of the four propellant tanks on the fourth stage of the Vega rocket—the upper stage, which is powered by dimethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide solid fuel—went missing earlier this year.

Now, it seems that the propellant tanks have been found. However, the newsletter says, the tanks were recovered in a dismal state, crushed, alongside metal scraps in a landfill. Someone, apparently, had trashed the tanks. This is a rather big problem for Avio, as this was to be the final Vega rocket launched, and the production lines are now closed for this hardware.

Enlarge / The family portrait of IBM’s quantum processors, with the two new arrivals (Heron and Condor) at right. (credit: IBM)

We talked with IBM’s Jay Gambetta about everything the company is announcing today, including existing processors, future roadmaps, what the machines might be used for over the next few years, and the software that makes it all possible. But to understand what the company is doing, we have to back up a bit to look at where the field as a whole is moving.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

US Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) is one of the more technologically engaged of our elected lawmakers. And like many technologically engaged Ars Technica readers, he does not like what he sees in terms of automakers’ approach to data privacy. On Friday, Sen. Markey wrote to 14 car companies with a variety of questions about data privacy policies, urging them to do better.

As Ars reported in September, the Mozilla Foundation published a scathing report on the subject of data privacy and automakers. The problems were widespread—most automakers collect too much personal data and are too eager to sell or share it with third parties, the foundation found.

Markey noted the Mozilla Foundation report in his letters, which were sent to BMW, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Stellantis, Subaru, Tesla, Toyota, and Volkswagen. The senator is concerned about the large amounts of data that modern cars can collect, including the troubling potential to use biometric data (like the rate a driver blinks and breathes, as well as their pulse) to infer mood or mental health.