New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.

Ellie is good at plenty of things, but not so good at lying low.
Credit:
HBO

The cordyceps threat keeps evolving.
Credit:
HBO

Read full article

Comments

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge:

This morning, while summarizing an Apple “product blitz” he expects for 2027, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman writes in his Power On newsletter that Apple is planning a “mostly glass, curved iPhone” with no display cutouts for that year, which happens to be the iPhone’s 20th anniversary… [T]he closest hints are probably in Apple patents revealed over the years, like one from 2019 that describes a phone encased in glass that “forms a continuous loop” around the device.

Apart from a changing iPhone, Gurman describes what sounds like a big year for Apple. He reiterates past reports that the first foldable iPhone should be out by 2027, and that the company’s first smart glasses competitor to Meta Ray-Bans will be along that year. So will those rumored camera-equipped AirPods and Apple Watches, he says. Gurman also suggests that Apple’s home robot — a tabletop robot that features “an AI assistant with its own personality” — will come in 2027…

Finally, Gurman writes that by 2027 Apple could finally ship an LLM-powered Siri and may have created new chips for its server-side AI processing.

Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Apple is also “actively looking at” revamping the Safari web browser on its devices “to focus on AI-powered search engines.” (Apple’s senior VP of services “noted that searches on Safari dipped for the first time last month, which he attributed to people using AI.”)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What’s a reformed villain gotta do to impress the Justice League? That’s the dilemma faced by John Cena’s titular antihero in the first teaser for S2 of Peacemaker, James Gunn’s Emmy-nominated series spun off from his  2021 film, The Suicide Squad. We’ve got the same colorful cast of characters, but the new season will serve as something of a “soft reboot” as part of the new DC Universe (DCU) franchise.

(Spoilers for S1 and The Suicide Squad below.)

The eight-episode first season was set five months after the events of The Suicide Squad. Having survived a near-fatal shooting, Peacemaker—aka Christopher Smith—is recruited by the US government for a new mission: the mysterious Project Butterfly, led by a mercenary named Clemson Murn (Chukwudi Iwuji). The team also included A.R.G.U.S. agent John Economos (Steve Agee) of the Belle Reve Penitentiary, National Security Agency agent and former Waller aide Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), and new team member Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks).

Read full article

Comments

OpenAI is currently in “a tough negotiation” with Microsoft, the Financial Times reports, citing “one person close to OpenAI.”

On the road to building artificial general intelligence, OpenAI hopes to unlock new funding (and launch a future IPO), according to the article, which says both sides are at work “rewriting the terms of their multibillion-dollar partnership in a high-stakes negotiation….”

Microsoft, meanwhile, wants to protect its access to OpenAI’s cutting-edge AI models…

[Microsoft] is a key holdout to the $260bn start-up’s plans to undergo a corporate restructuring that moves the group further away from its roots as a non-profit with a mission to develop AI to “benefit humanity”. A critical issue in the deliberations is how much equity in the restructured group Microsoft will receive in exchange for the more than $13bn it has invested in OpenAI to date.

According to multiple people with knowledge of the negotiations, the pair are also revising the terms of a wider contract, first drafted when Microsoft first invested $1bn into OpenAI in 2019. The contract currently runs to 2030 and covers what access Microsoft has to OpenAI’s intellectual property such as models and products, as well as a revenue share from product sales. Three people with direct knowledge of the talks said Microsoft is offering to give up some of its equity stake in OpenAI’s new for-profit business in exchange for accessing new technology developed beyond the 2030 cut off…

Industry insiders said a failure of OpenAI’s new plan to make its business arm a public benefits corporation could prove a critical blow. That would hit OpenAI’s ability to raise more cash, achieve a future float, and obtain the financial resources to take on Big Tech rivals such as Google. That has left OpenAI’s future at the mercy of investors, such as Microsoft, who want to ensure they gain the benefit of its enormous growth, said Dorothy Lund, professor of law at Columbia Law School.
Lund says OpenAI’s need for investors’ money means they “need to keep them happy.” But there also appears to be tension from how OpenAI competes with Microsoft (like targeting its potential enterprise customers with AI products). And the article notes that OpenAI also turned to Oracle (and SoftBank) for its massive AI infrastructure project Stargate. One senior Microsoft employee complained that OpenAI “says to Microsoft, ‘give us money and compute and stay out of the way: be happy to be on the ride with us’. So naturally this leads to tensions. To be honest, that is a bad partner attitude, it shows arrogance.”

The article’s conclusion? Negotiating new deal is “critical to OpenAI’s restructuring efforts and could dictate the future of a company…”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fusion energy “took one step closer to reality,” announced the University of Texas at Austin, as their researchers joined with a team from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Type One Energy Group and “solved a longstanding problem in the field” — how to contain high-energy particles inside fusion reactors.

When high-energy alpha particles leak from a reactor, that prevents the plasma from getting hot and dense enough to sustain the fusion reaction. To prevent them from leaking, engineers design elaborate magnetic confinement systems, but there are often holes in the magnetic field, and a tremendous amount of computational time is required to predict their locations and eliminate them. In their paper published in Physical Review Letters, the research team describes having discovered a shortcut that can help engineers design leak-proof magnetic confinement systems 10 times as fast as the gold standard method, without sacrificing accuracy… “What’s most exciting is that we’re solving something that’s been an open problem for almost 70 years,” said Josh Burby, assistant professor of physics at UT and first author of the paper. “It’s a paradigm shift in how we design these reactors….”
This new method also can help with a similar but different problem in another popular magnetic fusion reactor design called a tokamak. In that design, there’s a problem with runaway electrons — high-energy electrons that can punch a hole in the surrounding walls. This new method can help identify holes in the magnetic field where these electrons might leak.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged three malicious npm packages that target the macOS version of AI-powered code-editing tool Cursor, reports The Hacker News:

“Disguised as developer tools offering ‘the cheapest Cursor API,’ these packages steal user credentials, fetch an encrypted payload from threat actor-controlled infrastructure, overwrite Cursor’s main.js file, and disable auto-updates to maintain persistence,” Socket researcher Kirill Boychenko said. All three packages continue to be available for download from the npm registry. “Aiide-cur” was first published on February 14, 2025…

In total, the three packages have been downloaded over 3,200 times to date…. The findings point to an emerging trend where threat actors are using rogue npm packages as a way to introduce malicious modifications to other legitimate libraries or software already installed on developer systems… “By operating inside a legitimate parent process — an IDE or shared library — the malicious logic inherits the application’s trust, maintains persistence even after the offending package is removed, and automatically gains whatever privileges that software holds, from API tokens and signing keys to outbound network access,” Socket told The Hacker News.
“This campaign highlights a growing supply chain threat, with threat actors increasingly using malicious patches to compromise trusted local software,” Boychenko said.

The npm packages “restart the application so that the patched code takes effect,” letting the threat actor “execute arbitrary code within the context of the platform.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 years ago Slashdot covered the creation of Spaceport America.
Today Space.com hails it as “the first purpose-built commercial spaceport in the world.” But engineer/executive director Scott McLaughlin has plans to grow even more.

Already home to an array of commercial space industry tenants, such as Virgin Galactic, SpinLaunch, Up Aerospace, and Prismatic, Spaceport America is a “rocket-friendly environment of 6,000 square miles of restricted airspace, low population density, a 12,000-foot by 200-foot runway, vertical launch complexes, and about 340 days of sunshine and low humidity,” the organization boasts on its website…

Space.com: What changes do you see that make Spaceport America even more viable today?

McLaughlin: I think opening ourselves up to doing different kinds of work. We’re more like a civilian test range now. We’ve got high-altitude UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles]. We’re willing to do engine production. We believe we’re about to sign a data center, one that’s able to provide services to our customers who want low-latency, artificial intelligence, or high-powered computing. You’ll be able to rent some virtual machines and do your own thing and have it be instantaneous at the spaceport. So I think being more broadminded about what we can do at the spaceport is helping generate customers and revenue…

Our goal is to see Virgin Galactic fly in a year or so, hopefully flying twice a week, and that will have a big impact on the spaceport… [W]e’re trying to be open-minded as we’re partnered with White Sands Missile Range to use that airspace. We’re even looking at things like an electromagnetic pulse facility. It’s a customer that I can’t identify yet… We are working on a “reentry” license too. We recently discussed this with specialists and we think we have a site relatively close to the spaceport that’s flat and free of mesquite bushes and such, so we can do capsule return and other types of return. And of course we have the runway. So I’d think we’d be the only spaceport that does vertical and horizontal launch and reentry….

We’re never going to have the throughput that the Cape in Florida has. But we’ll be a good alternative especially if you’re going to do a small to medium-sized launch, and you need to do it quickly, and perhaps do it more securely than you would if you were to fly over water. That’s why the Department of Defense is showing interest in the inland spaceport.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Whoop fitness trackers had promised free upgrades to anyone who’d been a member for at least six months — and then reneged. “After customers began complaining, the company responded with a Reddit post, according to a report from TechCrunch:

Now, anyone with more than 12 months remaining on their subscription is eligible for a free upgrade to Whoop 5.0 (or a refund if they’ve already paid the fee). And customers with less than 12 months can extend their subscription to get the upgrade at no additional cost.
Whoop acknowledged that they’d previously said anyone who’d been a member for six months would receive a free upgrade. Friday they described that blog article as “incorrect”. (“This was never our policy and should never have been posted… We removed that blog article… We’re sorry for any confusion this may have caused.”)
TechCrunch explains:
While the company said it’s making these changes because it “heard your feedback,” it also suggested that its apparent stinginess was tied to its transition from a [2021] model focused on monthly or six-month subscription plans to one where it only offers 12- and 24-month subscriptions…

There’s been a mixed response to these changes on the Whoop subreddit, with one moderator describing it as a “win for the community.” Other posters were more skeptical, with one writing, “You don’t publish a policy by accident and keep it up for years. Removing it after backlash doesn’t erase the fact [that] it is real.”

Other changes announced by Whoop:

“If you purchased or renewed a WHOOP 4.0 membership in the last 30 days before May 8, your upgrade fee will be automatically waived at checkout…”
“If you’ve already upgraded to WHOOP 5.0 on Peak and paid a one-time upgrade fee despite having more than 12 months remaining, we’ll refund that fee.”
“Thank you for your feedback. We remain committed to delivering the best technology, experience, and value to our community.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“When Rust developers think of us C++ folks, they picture a cursed bloodline,” writes professional game developer Mamadou Babaei (also a *nix enthusiast who contributes to the FreeBSD Ports collection). “To them, every line of C++ we write is like playing Russian Roulette — except all six chambers are loaded with undefined behavior.”
But you know what? We don’t need a compiler nanny. No borrow checker. No lifetimes. No ownership models. No black magic. Not even Valgrind is required. Just raw pointers, raw determination, and a bit of questionable sanity.

He’s created a video on “how to hunt down memory leaks like you were born with a pointer in one hand and a debugger in the other.” (It involves using a memory leak tracker — specifically, Visual Studio’s _CrtDumpMemoryLeaks, which according to its documentation “dumps all the memory blocks in the debug heap when a memory leak has occurred,” identifying the offending lines and pointers.)

“If that sounds unreasonably dangerous — and incredibly fun… let’s dive into the deep end of the heap.”

“The method is so easy, it renders Rust’s memory model (lifetimes, ownership) and the borrow checker useless!” writes Slashdot reader NuLL3rr0r. Does anybody agree with him? Share your own experiences and reactions in the comments.
And how do you feel about Rust’s “borrow-checking compiler nanny”?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.