Enlarge / This is what Ample’s battery modules look like. (credit: Ample)

A small fleet of rideshare Fiat 500e electric vehicles will become testbeds for battery-swap technology in 2024. The experiment is being conducted by Ample, a startup working on battery swaps, and Stellantis, Fiat’s parent company, the Verge reported today.

This isn’t Ample’s first test of its battery-swapping technology; in 2021 it started a small trial in the Bay Area to demo its modular battery, which replaces the existing traction battery in an EV and allows Ample’s automated swap stations to switch out depleted packs for charged ones. But the fact that this deal was made with an OEM like Stellantis is still significant.

As we detailed last time we looked at Ample’s technology, the EVs require some engineering work for this to all be possible. Ample has to design a structural frame to replace the existing battery pack that will instead contain the swappable modules, while still conforming to the engineering requirements of the original pack—down to the same fasteners, bolts, and connectors.

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Three short HP video ad campaigns detailed by Marketing Communication News include one with a customer supremely frustrated with his printer’s low ink warning. He kicks his hardware off the table before words appear saying, “No more low ink with HP ink solutions.” Another HP video brags of “no more installation fails” and points to HP’s Smart app. Both of these claims fall apart with a look at HP’s recent and poorly executed firmware rollouts.

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The shutdown is scheduled for February 27, 2024, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy announced on Tuesday. Transmitting data in Korea “is prohibitively expensive” despite the company’s efforts to reduce data usage, he wrote.

“First, we experimented with a peer-to-peer model for source quality. Then, we adjusted source quality to a maximum of 720p. While we have lowered costs from these efforts, our network fees in Korea are still 10 times more expensive than in most other countries. Twitch has been operating in Korea at a significant loss, and unfortunately there is no pathway forward for our business to run more sustainably in that country,” Clancy wrote.

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Windows’ infamous “Blue Screen of Death” is a bit of a punchline. People have made a hobby of spotting them out in the wild, and in some circles, they remain a byword for the supposed flakiness and instability of PCs. To this day, networked PCs in macOS are represented by beige CRT monitors displaying a BSOD.

But the BSOD is supposed to be a diagnostic tool, an informational screen that technicians can use to begin homing in on the problem that caused the crash in the first place; that old Windows’ BSOD error codes were often so broad and vague as to be useless doesn’t make the idea a bad one. Today, version 255 of the Linux systemd project honors that original intent by adding a systemd-bsod component that generates a full-screen display of some error messages when a Linux system crashes.

The systemd-bsod component is currently listed as “experimental” and “subject to change.” But the functionality is simple: any logged error message that reaches the LOG_EMERG level will be displayed full-screen to allow people to take a photo or write it down. Phoronix reports that, as with BSODs in modern Windows, the Linux version will also generate a QR code to make it easier to look up information on your phone.

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Meta has started enabling end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default for chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook despite protests from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies that oppose the widespread use of encryption technology. “Today I’m delighted to announce that we are rolling out default end-to-end encryption for personal messages and calls on Messenger and Facebook,” Meta VP of Messenger Loredana Crisan wrote yesterday.

In April, a consortium of 15 law enforcement agencies from around the world, including the FBI and ICE Homeland Security Investigations, urged Meta to cancel its plan to expand the use of end-to-end encryption. The consortium complained that terrorists, sex traffickers, child abusers, and other criminals will use encrypted messages to evade law enforcement.

Meta held firm, telling Ars in April that “we don’t think people want us reading their private messages” and that the plan to make end-to-end encryption the default in Facebook Messenger would be completed before the end of 2023. Meta also plans default end-to-end encryption for Instagram messages but has previously said that may not happen this year.

Enlarge / Apple’s 15-inch M2 MacBook Air. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

The MacBook Air is Apple’s most popular laptop, and when the Apple M1 and M2 chips landed, they came to the Air first. That changed with the M3 chip generation, which came to the MacBook Pro and iMac first but left the Air untouched.

That situation should change early next year, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Apple is reportedly preparing to launch updates to the MacBook Air, as well as several new iPad models, in “the March time frame.” Apple hasn’t released any new iPads in 2023, and the 13-inch M2 MacBook Air was introduced in July of 2022.

Gurman says not to expect design changes from the M3 Air. The M2 version introduced a new non-tapered design with a display notch, a new keyboard, and a MagSafe port, and the M3 Air should look externally identical.

Enlarge / An infrared image of one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI)

We are not alone—at least as a galaxy. About 50 dwarf galaxies surround the Milky Way. But when its intense gravity inevitably draws them to venture too close, they will probably be annihilated. It’s happened before.

Though scientists used to think that all those dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way were going to stick around for tens of billions of years, that might not be the case. “Most dwarf galaxies are star systems that arrived late in the Milky Way… in sharp contrast with a long-term satellite hypothesis,” an international team of researchers said in a study recently published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Based on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, this study has found that many dwarf galaxies that were orbiting the Milky Way only a few billion years ago have ended up destroyed after being pulled in by our much more massive galaxy. It is possible dark matter has something to do with this.

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Its passage in the House follows a letter-writing campaign by some US auto dealers to get the White House to abandon its climate targets as the dealers say they find it too difficult to sell electric vehicles.

As Ars detailed at the time, the tougher new regulations will require automakers to sell four times as many zero-emission vehicles to meet the new fleet averages. If the rules go into effect, two-thirds of all new passenger cars and light trucks would have to be EVs by 2032.

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Then, late last month, those years of brushing off US regulators caught up with the company in the form of one the most punitive money-laundering criminal settlements in the history of the US Justice Department. The crackdown doesn’t just mean a chastened Binance will have to change its practices going forward. It means that when the company is sentenced in a matter of months, it will be forced to open its past books to regulators, too. What was once a haven for anarchic crypto commerce is about to be transformed into the opposite: perhaps the most fed-friendly business in the cryptocurrency industry, retroactively offering more than a half-decade of users’ transaction records to US regulators and law enforcement.

When the Department of Justice announced on November 21 that Binance’s executives had agreed to plead guilty to criminal money-laundering charges, much of the attention on that settlement focused on founder Changpeng Zhao giving up his CEO role and on the company’s record-breaking $4.3 billion fine. But Binance’s settlement agreements with the DOJ and the US Treasury Department also stipulate a strict new regime of data-sharing with law enforcement and regulators. The company has agreed to comply with regulators’ “requests for information”—a term that carries none of the evidence or suspicion requirements necessary for obtaining a warrant or even a subpoena—to the point of producing any “information, testimony, document, record, or other tangible evidence.”

Enlarge / The Heart Nebula. (credit: Paul Macklin)

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.

Enlarge / The OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule, with its main parachute nearby, shortly after landing in Utah on September 24, 2023. (credit: Keegan Barber/NASA)

On September 24, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft released the canister containing the asteroid samples to plunge into the Earth’s atmosphere, while the mothership steered onto a course to take it safely back into deep space for a follow-up mission to explore a different asteroid at the end of the 2020s.

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Alan Rosa, who was fired on December 6, 2022, “was Head of Global Information Technology and Information Security and worked remotely for Twitter performing the majority of his job duties from his home in New Jersey,” said the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the District of New Jersey. He also sometimes worked in Twitter’s New York and California offices.

Rosa was required to resolve his claims through arbitration and says that he filed a demand for arbitration in April 2023 and paid his arbitration filing fee. Rosa alleges that “Twitter has refused to pay its portion of the arbitration fees despite being ordered by JAMS [Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services] to do so.”

Enlarge / A now-deleted Intel presentation makes a good point, but with a side of disingenuousness.

AMD changed the way it numbers its Ryzen laptop processors last year, switching to a new system that simultaneously provides more concrete information than the old one while also partially obfuscating the exact age of the various CPU and GPU architectures being mixed-and-matched.

For instance, a knowledgeable buyer can look at the “3” in the Ryzen 5 7530U processor and determine that it uses an older Zen 3-based CPU core. But a less-knowledgeable buyer could be forgiven for looking at the “7000” part and assuming that the chip is significantly newer and better than 2021’s Ryzen 5600U, when in reality the two are substantially identical.

Intel came out swinging against this naming scheme in a confrontational slide deck this week—now deleted, but preserved for posterity by VideoCardz—where it accuses AMD of selling “snake oil” by using older processor architectures in ostensibly “new” chips.

Enlarge / Three images generated by “Imagine with Meta AI” using the Emu AI model. (credit: Meta | Benj Edwards)

On Wednesday, Meta released a free standalone AI image generator website, “Imagine with Meta AI,” based on its Emu image synthesis model. Meta used 1.1 billion publicly visible Facebook and Instagram images to train the AI model, which can render a novel image from a written prompt. Previously, Meta’s version of this technology—using the same data—was only available in messaging and social networking apps such as Instagram.

If you’re on Facebook or Instagram, it’s quite possible a picture of you (or that you took) helped train Emu. In a way, the old saying, “If you’re not paying for it, you are the product” has taken on a whole new meaning. Although, as of 2016, Instagram users uploaded over 95 million photos a day, so the dataset Meta used to train its AI model was a small subset of its overall photo library.

Since Meta says it only uses publicly available photos for training, setting your photos private on Instagram or Facebook should prevent their inclusion in the company’s future AI model training (unless it changes that policy, of course).

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Shortly after 23andMe confirmed that hackers stole ancestry data of 6.9 million users, 23andMe has updated its terms of service, seemingly cutting off a path previously granted to users seeking public accountability when resolving disputes.

According to a post on Hacker News, the “23andMe Team” notified users in an email that “important updates were made to the Dispute Resolution and Arbitration section” of 23andMe’s terms of service on November 30. This was done, 23andMe told users, “to include procedures that will encourage a prompt resolution of any disputes and to streamline arbitration proceedings where multiple similar claims are filed.”

In the email, 23andMe told users that they had 30 days to notify the ancestry site that they disagree with the new terms. Otherwise, 23andMe users “will be deemed to have agreed to the new terms.” The process for opting out is detailed in the site’s ToS, instructing users to send written notice of their decision to opt out in an email to arbitrationoptout@23andme.com.

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Android users’ hopes that Apple’s iMessage would be forced to open up in the European Union have been dashed. Bloomberg reports that iMessage won’t qualify for the EU’s new “Digital Markets Act,” allowing Apple to keep iMessage exclusive to Apple users.

The EU is deciding what should and shouldn’t be under the new rules set out by the “Digital Markets Act.” The idea is that Big Tech “gatekeepers” will be subject to certain interoperability, fairness, and privacy rules. So far the wide-ranging rules have targeted 22 different services, including app stores on iOS and Android, browsers like Chrome and Safari, the Android, iOS, and Windows OSes, ad platforms from Google, Amazon, and Meta, video sites YouTube and TikTok, and instant messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Google recently rolled out a campaign to implore the EU to qualify iMessage for regulation, as Android’s iMessage incompatibility is a big deal in the US. iMessage hasn’t made the list, though, and that’s despite meeting the popularity metrics of 45 million monthly active EU users. In the EU and most other parts of the world, the dominant messaging platform is WhatsApp, and with the Digital Market Act’s focus on business usage, not general consumers, iMessage will just squeak by. Right now the EU is “investigating” a handful of borderline additions to the Digital Markets Act, with a deadline in February 2024.

Enlarge / AMD’s Ryzen 8040 series is a lot like the 7040 series but with a higher model number. (credit: AMD)

Both Intel and AMD usually have processor updates to announce at CES in January, but AMD isn’t waiting to introduce its next-generation flagship laptop chips: the Ryzen 8040 series is coming to laptops starting in early 2024, though at first blush these chips look awfully similar to the Ryzen 7040 processors that AMD announced just seven months ago.

Though the generational branding is jumping from 7000 to 8000, the CPU and GPU of the Ryzen 8040 series are nearly identical to the ones in the 7040 series. The chips AMD is announcing today use up to eight Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3-based integrated GPUs (either a Radeon 780M with 12 compute units, or Radeon 760M or 740M GPUs with 8 or 4 CUs). The chips are manufactured using the same 4 nm TSMC process as the 7040 series.

There’s also an AI-accelerating neural processing unit (NPU) that AMD claims is about 1.4 times faster than the one in the Ryzen 7040 series in large language models like Llama 2 and ONNX vision models. Both NPUs are based on the same XDNA architecture and have the same amount of processing hardware—AMD says that the AI performance improvements come mostly from higher clock speeds.

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An FCC Notice of Inquiry issued on November 1 proposes to analyze the affordability of Internet service in the agency’s next congressionally required review of broadband deployment. That could include examining not just monthly prices but also data overage charges and various other fees.