A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is seen outside the company’s hangar at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX and the US Space Force thought they were ready to launch the military’s mysterious X-37B spaceplane this week, but ground teams in Florida need to roll the Falcon Heavy rocket back into its hangar for servicing.

This is expected to push back the launch until at least late December, perhaps longer. SpaceX and Space Force officials have not divulged details about the problems causing the delay.

SpaceX called off a launch attempt Monday night at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to resolve a problem with a ground system. A senior Space Force official told Ars on Wednesday that additional issues will cause an additional delay in the launch.

Enlarge / Dragon Sector uploaded a video to social media after discovering an “undocumented ‘unlock code’ which you could enter from the train driver’s panel” fixed “mysterious issues” impacting trains in Poland. (credit: Adam Haertle on YouTube)

Members of an ethical hacking group called Dragon Sector, including Sergiusz Bazański and Michał Kowalczyk, were called upon by a train repair shop, Serwis Pojazdów Szynowych (SPS), to analyze train software in June 2022. SPS was desperate to figure out what was causing “mysterious failures” that shut down several vehicles owned by Polish train operator the Lower Silesian Railway, Polish infrastructure trade publication Rynek Kolejowy reported. At that point, the shortage of trains had already become “a serious problem” for carriers and passengers, as fewer available cars meant shorter trains and reduced rider capacity, Rynek Kolejowy reported.

Dragon Sector spent two months analyzing the software, finding that “the manufacturer’s interference” led to “forced failures and to the fact that the trains did not start,” and concluding that bricking the trains “was a deliberate action on Newag’s part.”

Enlarge / Signage is displayed outside the Humana Inc. office building in Louisville, Kentucky, US, in 2016. (credit: Getty | Luke Sharrett)

According to a lawsuit filed Tuesday, Humana’s use of the AI model constitutes a “fraudulent scheme” that leaves elderly beneficiaries with either overwhelming medical debt or without needed care that is covered by their plans. Meanwhile, the insurance behemoth reaps a “financial windfall.”

The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court in western Kentucky, is led by two people who had a Humana Medicare Advantage Plan policy and said they were wrongfully denied needed and covered care, harming their health and finances. The suit seeks class-action status for an unknown number of other beneficiaries nationwide who may be in similar situations. Humana provides Medicare Advantage plans for 5.1 million people in the US.

Enlarge / Starlink satellite dish. (credit: Getty Images | olegda88)

The FCC announced yesterday that it rejected SpaceX’s appeal. “The FCC followed a careful legal, technical and policy review to determine that this applicant had failed to meet its burden to be entitled to nearly $900 million in universal service funds for almost a decade,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said.

In December 2020, shortly before the departure of then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, Starlink was tentatively awarded $885.51 million in broadband funding from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). But the satellite provider still needed FCC approval of a long-form application to receive the money, which is meant to subsidize deployment in areas with little or no high-speed broadband access.

Enlarge / The ESA headquarters in Paris. (credit: ESA – P. Sebirot)

According to a new internal survey conducted by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) staff association, about 30 percent of ESA’s employees have either experienced or witnessed harassment in the workplace. The survey, published internally on December 6 and seen by Ars Technica, confirms the findings of our recent investigation into allegations of harassment and bullying at the agency.

The internal survey ran from July 19 to September 15 of this year and collected the responses of 2,751 workers, representing nearly half of all ESA employees across its six main centers in France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Spain, and Italy. The ESA staff association was set up by ESA to represent staff members, but the survey included both staff members and on-site contractors who are loaned to the agency through a network of cooperating manpower companies in Europe.

Among the respondents, nearly a third said they had witnessed harassment during their time at the agency, while 28 percent said they had directly experienced it. The report states that a “complementary analysis of 1,200 comments” provided by the respondents suggests that about 20 percent of the reported incidents took place within the past 24 months. The types of harassment disclosed in the survey included bullying and mobbing (60 percent of cases), moral harassment (30 percent of cases) and sexual harassment (10 percent cases).

Enlarge

Google announced big changes to its most legally fraught set of user settings: your location data. Google’s misleading Location History descriptions in Google Maps have earned it several lawsuits in the US and worldwide. A quick count involves individual lawsuits in California, Arizona, Washington, a joint lawsuit in Texas, Indiana, and the District of Columbia, and another joint lawsuit across 40 additional US states. Internationally, Google has also been sued in Australia over its location settings. The point is that any change to Google’s location settings must have some motive behind it, so bear with us while we try to decode everything.

Google’s big new location data change is a new, duplicate data store that will live exclusively on your device. Google’s new blog post says data for the long-running Google Maps Timeline feature will now “be saved right on your device—giving you even more control over your data.” That’s right, one of the world’s biggest Internet data companies advocates for local storage of your location data.

The company continues, “If you’re getting a new phone or are worried about losing your existing one, you can always choose to back up your data to the cloud so it doesn’t get lost. We’ll automatically encrypt your backed-up data so no one can read it, including Google.” Users will apparently have lots of control over this new locally stored data, with Google saying, “Soon, you’ll be able to see all your recent activity on Maps… in one central place, and easily delete your searches, directions, visits, and shares with just a few taps. The ability to delete place-related activity from Maps starts rolling out on Android and iOS in the coming weeks.”

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Even with assurances of data privacy laid out by Dropbox on an AI privacy FAQ page, the discovery that the setting had been enabled by default upset some Dropbox users. The setting was first noticed by writer Winifred Burton, who shared information about the Third-party AI setting through Bluesky on Tuesday, and frequent AI critic Karla Ortiz shared more information about it on X.

Ortiz expressed worries that the data might be trained secretly without consent. In its FAQ, Dropbox contradicts this claim, saying, “We won’t let our third-party partners train their models on our user data without consent.”

Enlarge / Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber defied expectations to deliver a document that explicitly calls for limits on fossil fuel use. (credit: Fadel Dawod)

On Wednesday, the UN’s COP28 meeting wrapped up with a major success: Despite a bruising fight with OPEC nations, the closing agreement included a call for a transition away from fossil fuels. There’s still plenty here for various parties to dislike, but this is the first agreement that makes the implications of the Paris Treaty explicit: We can’t limit climate change and continue to burn fossil fuels at anything close to the rate we currently do.

Beyond that, however, the report has something to disappoint everyone. It catalogs strong signs of incremental progress toward the Paris goals while acknowledging we’re running out of time for further increments. And the steps it calls for will likely keep changes on a similar trajectory.

Taking stock

The new document is called a “Global Stocktake” in reference to checking the world’s progress toward the goals of the Paris Agreement: limit climate change to 2° C above preindustrial temperatures and try to keep it to 1.5° C. That agreement called for nations to make pledges to limit greenhouse gas emissions; initial pledges were insufficient, but regular meetings of the Conference of the Parties (COP) would allow the pledges to be updated, raising their aggressiveness until the world is on a trajectory toward meeting its goals.

Enlarge (credit: Leon Neal / Staff | Getty Images Europe)

It’s hard to know exactly how dire the financial situation is at Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter). However, insider sources recently revealed to Bloomberg that the social media platform expects to end 2023 with “roughly” $2.5 billion in advertising revenue.

That’s “a significant slump from prior years,” sources said. It’s also about half a billion short of the $3 billion that X executives expected to make in ad sales in 2023, one source said.

Last year, Twitter raked in more than $1 billion in ad revenue per quarter, sources said. But in each of the first three quarters of 2023, X only managed to generate “a little more than $600 million” in ad revenue. Now, the most recent advertiser fallout over antisemitic content on X—estimated in November as triggering a sudden $75 million loss—is still casting a shadow on what could become an even more dismal fourth quarter.

Enlarge / A Rock’em Sock’em AI model battle. (credit: CSA Images)

As the AI landscape has expanded to include dozens of distinct large language models (LLMs), debates over which model provides the “best” answers for any given prompt have also proliferated (Ars has even delved into these kinds of debates a few times in recent months). For those looking for a more rigorous way of comparing various models, the folks over at the Large Model Systems Organization (LMSys) have set up Chatbot Arena, a platform for generating Elo-style rankings for LLMs based on a crowdsourced blind-testing website.

Chatbot Arena users can enter any prompt they can think of into the site’s form to see side-by-side responses from two randomly selected models. The identity of each model is initially hidden, and results are voided if the model reveals its identity in the response itself.

The user then gets to pick which model provided what they judge to be the “better” result, with additional options for a “tie” or “both are bad.” Only after providing a pairwise ranking does the user get to see which models they were judging, though a separate “side-by-side” section of the site lets users pick two specific models to compare (without the ability to contribute a vote on the result).

Enlarge / Picture of attorney David Schwartz from his website. (credit: David Schwartz)

“On November 29, 2023, David M. Schwartz, counsel of record for Defendant Michael Cohen, filed a motion for early termination of supervised release,” US District Judge Jesse Furman wrote in an order to show cause yesterday. “In the letter brief, Mr. Cohen asserts that, ‘[a]s recently as 2022, there have been District Court decisions, affirmed by the Second Circuit Court, granting early termination of supervised release.'”

Schwartz’s letter brief named “three such examples,” citing United States v. Figueroa-Florez, United States v. Ortiz, and United States v. Amato. The brief provided case numbers, summaries, and ruling dates, but Furman concluded that the cases are fake.

Enlarge / The Tesla Optimus Gen 2 robot. (credit: Tesla | Benj Edwards)

On Tuesday, Tesla released a demo video showing the latest version of its prototype humanoid robot, Optimus Gen 2. Over one year after Tesla’s first public Optimus robot demonstration, which showcased shaky robots that waved and slumped over, things have apparently progressed quite a bit, assuming that the video accurately reflects the technology.

“Everything in this video is real, no CGI. All real time, nothing sped up. Incredible hardware improvements from the team,” wrote Tesla Senior Staff Software Engineer Julian Ibarz on X.

After a recent episode where Google fudged an AI demonstration for the sake of marketing hype, it’s best to take Tesla’s claims with a grain of salt until they are independently verified in practical, real-world demonstrations. With that dose of skepticism in mind, let’s take a look at what Tesla is promising in this non-production prototype robot.

Enlarge / The 2023 Cadillac Lyriq had an extremely good CarPlay implementation. But that’s gone from GM EVs for MY2024 onward. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Few things have improved the state of in-car infotainment more than the advent of the phone casting interfaces from Apple and Google. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto let you run navigation or audio apps on your phone and interact with them via the car’s native infotainment screen, avoiding the need to handle your phone while driving.

That’s why General Motors’ decision to ditch CarPlay and Android Auto from new EVs from model year 2024 onward has been greeted with such dismay.

GM has rolled out a new infotainment platform across its new electric vehicles called Unifi. Built on the Android Automotive OS—not to be confused with the Android Auto phone casting system—a build we used in a model year 2023 Cadillac Lyriq featured the most complete implementation of CarPlay we’ve yet experienced, making GM’s decision to ditch the systems even more frustrating.

Enlarge / Tesla says that Autopilot users should always keep both hands on the steering wheel. (credit: CBS)

More than 2 million Tesla electric vehicles are subject to a new safety recall today. At issue is the much-criticized Autopilot driver-assistance feature, more specifically the Autosteer component.

At one time, Tesla claimed that Autosteer cut crashes by 40 percent—a statistic that turned out to be completely false once a third party analyzed the data. Now, following an ongoing engineering analysis by the National Highway Safety Administration Office of Defects Investigation that found Tesla has inadequate driver monitoring and that the system could lead to “foreseeable misuse,” the automaker has finally reacted.

Autopilot is Tesla’s name for a suite of advanced driver assistance systems, but the two principal components are “traffic-aware cruise control” and Autosteer. The former maintains the car’s speed relative to a vehicle in front, and the latter reads lane markers on the road and keeps the car between them. The system was originally based on one supplied by Mobileye, although that relationship broke down, and Tesla was dropped as a customer by Mobileye due to Mobileye’s concern that Tesla was “pushing the envelope in terms of safety.”

Enlarge / Close up of hand holding smartphone and screen applications with unlocking mobile phones. Concept of technological safety. (credit: Getty Images)

This FAQ dives into the many nuances that make AutoSpill hard for most people (yours truly included) to understand. This post wouldn’t have been possible without invaluable assistance from Alesandro Ortiz, a researcher who discovered a similar vulnerability in Chrome in 2020.

Q: What is AutoSpill?

Enlarge / The new Chevrolet Blazer EV is the latest electric vehicle to use General Motors’ Ultium battery platform. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

DEL MAR, Calif.—Americans love midsize SUVs—American automotive product planners, at any rate. These SUVs have supplanted sedans and station wagons as the family-mobile of choice, offering all the advantages of a hatchback with a lofty driving position. Now there’s a new one in town, an all-electric version of the Chevrolet Blazer. It’s not an EV conversion of the existing Blazer but a new model built on the same dedicated platform as the Cadillac Lyriq. After a few hours driving the new Blazer EV around the outskirts of San Diego, here’s what we’ve learned.

In time, the Blazer EV will be available in three trims (LT, RS, and SS) and in front-, rear-, and all-wheel drive configurations. But for now, Chevy is starting with the Blazer EV RS, available with either a single motor driving the rear wheels and a larger-capacity battery or an all-wheel drive variant with a smaller-capacity battery pack.

Chevy arranged for us to drive the $57,200 Blazer EV RS RWD first, so let’s start there. It uses a 102 kWh battery pack to achieve an EPA range of 324 miles (521 km), sending that energy to a 340 hp (254 kW), 325 lb-ft (440 Nm) permanent magnet electric motor.

Enlarge / An image of a Kuiper satellite in space. (credit: HEO Space)

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 / This photo is exactly what it was like to be on the E3 show floor. Exactly. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Today’s news that the Electronic Entertainment Expo is officially, totally, and completely dead was a bit bittersweet for your humble Ars Technica Senior Gaming Editor. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll miss the chance to meet industry luminaries, connect with far-flung associates, and play games months ahead of time in a setting that’s as much a theme park as a trade show. But after spending many a late night covering 15 E3 shows in 16 years, I can say that the crowds, the smells, and the sensory overload associated with the LA Convention Center aren’t always all they’re cracked up to be.

Still, those who have been there will tell you that, for a gaming fan, there was nothing quite like the bombast and spectacle of the E3 show floor in its heyday.

For those who haven’t been there, we’ve sorted through literally hundreds of E3 photos taken by Ars journalists over the years to assemble a few dozen of the best into this visual travelogue-meets-history-lesson. We hope that skimming through the galleries below will give you some idea of the madcap event that E3 was and why it has generated so many lasting memories for those who attended.