Ars Technica

Earlier this month, startup Embodied announced that it is going out of business and taking its Moxie robot with it. The $800 robots, aimed at providing emotional support for kids ages 5 to 10, would soon be bricked, the company said, because they can’t perform their core features without the cloud. Following customer backlash, Embodied is trying to create a way for the robots to live an open sourced second life.

Embodied CEO Paolo Pirjanian shared a document via a LinkedIn blog post today saying that people who used to be part of Embodied’s technical team are developing a “potential” and open source way to keep Moxies running. The document reads:

This initiative involves developing a local server application (‘OpenMoxie’) that you can run on your own computer. Once available, this community-driven option will enable you (or technically inclined individuals) to maintain Moxie’s basic functionality, develop new features, and modify her capabilities to better suit your needs—without reliance on Embodied’s cloud servers.

The notice says that after releasing OpenMoxie, Embodied plans to release “all necessary code and documentation” for developers and users.

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Craig Wright, the man who claims he invented bitcoin and has been filing lawsuits asserting intellectual property rights, was sentenced to a year in prison yesterday for committing contempt of court.

The sentence is suspended and can be enforced if Wright continues violating court rulings—but he may be able to avoid imprisonment by staying away from countries that have extradition agreements with the UK. Wright defied an order to attend a court hearing in person this week and said he is in Asia.

Wright "was sentenced for contempt of court on Thursday" for bringing a 911 billion pound ($1.1 trillion) lawsuit "against Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's payments company Block in Britain," Reuters wrote.

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If you want to watch the next two FIFA Women’s World Cups in the US, you’ll need a Netflix subscription.

FIFA confirmed the news today, marking an unexpected change for the sports event, which has historically played on free-to-air broadcast channels. The shift to a streaming platform inevitably makes it more costly and hurts viewer accessibility, while likely injecting FIFA with a lot of cash.

Netflix and FIFA haven’t said how much Netflix is paying for exclusive airing rights. But Netflix and other streaming services have been paying out hefty, sometimes record-setting sums to air live sporting events as the company seeks to earn more revenue from commercials and draw more viewers. Netflix, for example, paid $5 billion to swipe the World Wrestling Entertainment’s weekly RAW program from the USA cable network for 10 years, starting next month.

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On Wednesday, Elevation Lab announced TimeCapsule, a new $20 battery case purported to extend Apple AirTag battery life from one year to 10 years. The product replaces the standard CR2032 coin cell battery in the Bluetooth-based location tracker with two AA batteries to provide extended power capacity.

The TimeCapsule case requires users to remove their AirTag's original back plate and battery, then place the Apple device onto contact points inside the waterproof enclosure. The company recommends using Energizer Ultimate Lithium AA batteries, which it claims provide 14 times more power capacity than the stock coin cell battery configuration.

The CNC-machined aluminum case is aimed at users who place AirTags in vehicles, boats, or other applications where regular battery changes prove impractical. The company sells the TimeCapsule through its website and Amazon.

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Google will soon take more steps to make AI a part of search, exposing more users to its Gemini agent, according to recent reports and app teardowns.

"AI Mode," shown at the top left of the web results page and inside the Google app, will provide an interface similar to a Gemini AI chat, according to The Information.

This tracks with a finding from Android Authority earlier this month, which noted a dedicated "AI mode" button inside an early beta of the Google app. This shortcut also appeared on Google's Android search widget, and a conversation history button was added to the Google app. Going even deeper into the app, 9to5Google found references to "aim" (AI mode) and "ai_mode" which suggest a dedicated tab in the Google app, with buttons for speaking to an AI or sending it pictures.

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Yesterday, US Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Joshua Hawley (R-MO) sent letters to the heads of Ford, General Motors, and Tesla, as well as the US heads of Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Stellantis, Subaru, Toyota, and Volkswagen, excoriating them over their opposition to the right-to-repair movement.

"We need to hit the brakes on automakers stealing your data and undermining your right-to-repair," said Senator Merkley in a statement to Ars. "Time and again, these billionaire corporations have a double standard when it comes to your privacy and security: claiming that sharing vehicle data with repair shops poses cybersecurity risks while selling consumer data themselves. Oregon has one of the strongest right-to-repair laws in the nation, and that’s why I’m working across the aisle to advance efforts nationwide that protect consumer rights."

Most repairs aren’t at dealerships

The Senators point out that 70 percent of car parts and services currently come from independent outlets, which are seen as trustworthy and providing good value for money, "while nearly all dealerships receive the worst possible rating for price."

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Louisiana's health department has been barred from advertising or promoting vaccines for flu, COVID-19, and mpox, according to reporting by NPR, KFF Health News, and New Orleans Public Radio WWNO.

Their investigative report—based on interviews with multiple health department employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation—revealed that employees were told of the startling policy change in meetings in October and November and that the policy would be implemented quietly and not put into writing.

Ars Technica has contacted the health department for comment and will update this post with any new information.

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Over the past month, we've seen a rapid cadence of notable AI-related announcements and releases from both Google and OpenAI, and it's been making the AI community's head spin. It has also poured fuel on the fire of the OpenAI-Google rivalry, an accelerating game of one-upmanship taking place unusually close to the Christmas holiday.

"How are people surviving with the firehose of AI updates that are coming out," wrote one user on X last Friday, which is still a hotbed of AI-related conversation. "in the last <24 hours we got gemini flash 2.0 and chatGPT with screenshare, deep research, pika 2, sora, chatGPT projects, anthropic clio, wtf it never ends."

Rumors travel quickly in the AI world, and people in the AI industry had been expecting OpenAI to ship some major products in December. Once OpenAI announced "12 days of OpenAI" earlier this month, Google jumped into gear and seemingly decided to try to one-up its rival on several counts. So far, the strategy appears to be working, but it's coming at the cost of the rest of the world being able to absorb the implications of the new releases.

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In the hit virtual reality game Gorilla Tag, you swing your arms to pull your primate character around—clambering through virtual worlds, climbing up trees and, above all, trying to avoid an infectious mob of other gamers. If you’re caught, you join the horde. However, some kids playing the game claim to have found a way to cheat and easily “tag” opponents.

Over the past year, teenagers have produced video tutorials showing how to side-load a virtual private network (VPN) onto Meta’s virtual reality headsets and use the location-changing technology to get ahead in the game. Using a VPN, according to the tutorials, introduces a delay that makes it easier to sneak up and tag other players.

While the workaround is likely to be an annoying but relatively harmless bit of in-game cheating, there’s a catch. The free VPN app that the video tutorials point to, Big Mama VPN, is also selling access to its users’ home internet connections—with buyers essentially piggybacking on the VR headset’s IP address to hide their own online activity.

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Large language models represent text using tokens, each of which is a few characters. Short words are represented by a single token (like "the" or "it"), whereas larger words may be represented by several tokens (GPT-4o represents "indivisible" with "ind," "iv," and "isible").

When OpenAI released ChatGPT two years ago, it had a memory—known as a context window—of just 8,192 tokens. That works out to roughly 6,000 words of text. This meant that if you fed it more than about 15 pages of text, it would “forget” information from the beginning of its context. This limited the size and complexity of tasks ChatGPT could handle.

Today’s LLMs are far more capable:

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Almost no one ever writes about the Parker Solar Probe anymore.

Sure, the spacecraft got some attention when it launched.  It is, after all, the fastest moving object that humans have ever built. At its maximum speed, goosed by the gravitational pull of the Sun, the probe reaches a velocity of 430,000 miles per hour, or more than one-sixth of 1 percent the speed of light. That kind of speed would get you from New York City to Tokyo in less than a minute.

And the Parker Solar Probe also has the distinction of being the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person. At the time of its launch, in August 2018, physicist Eugene Parker was 91 years old.

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It's been a really busy month for Google as it apparently endeavors to outshine OpenAI with a blitz of AI releases. On Thursday, Google dropped its latest party trick: Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental, which is a new AI model that uses runtime "reasoning" techniques similar to OpenAI's o1 to achieve "deeper thinking" on problems fed into it.

The experimental model builds on Google's newly released Gemini 2.0 Flash and runs on its AI Studio platform, but early tests conducted by TechCrunch reporter Kyle Wiggers reveal accuracy issues with some basic tasks, such as incorrectly counting that the word "strawberry" contains two R's.

These so-called reasoning models differ from standard AI models by incorporating feedback loops of self-checking mechanisms, similar to techniques we first saw in early 2023 with hobbyist projects like "Baby AGI." The process requires more computing time, often adding extra seconds or minutes to response times. Companies have turned to reasoning models as traditional scaling methods at training time have been showing diminishing returns.

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Home Assistant announced today the availability of the Voice Preview Edition, its own design of a living-room-friendly box to offer voice assistance with home automation. Having used it for a few weeks, it seems like a great start, at least for those comfortable with digging into the settings. That's why Home Assistant is calling it a "Preview Edition."

Using its privacy-minded Nabu Casa cloud—or your own capable computer—to handle the processing, the Voice Preview Edition (VPE) ($60/60 euros, available today) has the rough footprint of a modern Apple TV but is thinner. It works similarly to an Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, or Apple Siri device, but with a more focused goal. Start with a wake word—the default, and most well-trained version, is "Okay, Nabu," but "Hey, Jarvis" and "Hey, Mycroft" are available. Follow that with a command, typically something that targets a smart home device: "Turn on living room lights," "Set thermostat to 68," "Activate TV time." And then, that thing usually happens.

Home Assistant's Voice Preview Edition, doing what it does best. I had to set a weather service to an alias of "the weather outside" to get that response worked out.

"That thing" is primarily controlling devices, scenes, and automations around your home, set up in Home Assistant. That means you have to have assigned them a name or alias that you can remember. Coming up with naming schemes is something you end up doing in big-tech smart home systems, too, but it's a bit more important with the VPE.

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Another company has publicly cut ties with Broadcom's VMware. This time, it's Ingram Micro, one of the world's biggest IT distributors. The announcement comes as Broadcom eyes services as a key part of maintaining VMware business in 2025. But even as some customers are reducing reliance on VMware, its trillion-dollar owner is laughing all the way to the bank.

IT distributor severs VMware ties

Ingram is reducing its Broadcom-related business to "limited engagement with VMware in select regions," a spokesperson told The Register this week.

"We were unable to reach an agreement with Broadcom that would help our customers deliver the best technology outcomes now and in the future while providing an appropriate shareholder return,” the spokesperson said.

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On Thursday, a large group of university and private industry researchers unveiled Genesis, a new open source computer simulation system that lets robots practice tasks in simulated reality 430,000 times faster than in the real world. Researchers can also use an AI agent to generate 3D physics simulations from text prompts.

The accelerated simulation means a neural network for piloting robots can spend the virtual equivalent of decades learning to pick up objects, walk, or manipulate tools during just hours of real computer time.

"One hour of compute time gives a robot 10 years of training experience. That's how Neo was able to learn martial arts in a blink of an eye in the Matrix Dojo," wrote Genesis paper co-author Jim Fan on X, who says he played a "minor part" in the research. Fan has previously worked on several robotics simulation projects for Nvidia.

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For months, popular fighting game YouTubers have been under attack. Even the seemingly most cautious among them have been duped by sophisticated phishing attacks that hack their accounts to push cryptocurrency scams by convincingly appearing to offer legitimate sponsorships from established brands.

These scams often start with bad actors seemingly taking over verified accounts on X (formerly Twitter) with substantial followings and then using them to impersonate marketing managers at real brands who can be easily found on LinkedIn.

The fake X accounts go to great lengths to appear legitimate. They link to brands' actual websites and populate feeds with histories seemingly spanning decades by re-posting brands' authentic posts.

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When the impossibly punctuated S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl released on November 20, after many delays (that included the Russian invasion of the developer's native Ukraine), it seemed like it could have used even more delays.

Stalker 2 had big performance issues and game-breaking bugs, along with balance and difficulty spike issues. Some things that seem "wrong" in the game are just going to stay that way. The first-person survival/shooter series has always had a certain wobbly, wild feel to it. This expresses itself in both the game world, where a major villain can off themselves by walking through a window, and in the tech stack, where broken save games, DIY optimization, and other unmet needs have created thriving mod scenes.

Developer GSC Game World has been steadfastly patching the game since its release, and the latest one should nudge the needle a bit from "busted" to "charmingly wonky." Amid the "Over 1,800 fixes and adjustments" in Patch 1.1, the big changes are to "A-Life." In porting Stalker 2 to Unreal Engine 5, the developer faced a challenge in getting this global AI management system working, but it's showing its weird self again.

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The Federal Aviation Administration temporarily banned drones over parts of New Jersey yesterday and said "the United States government may use deadly force against" airborne aircraft "if it is determined that the aircraft poses an imminent security threat."

The FAA issued 22 orders imposing "temporary flight restrictions for special security reasons" until January 17, 2025. "At the request of federal security partners, the FAA published 22 Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs) prohibiting drone flights over critical New Jersey infrastructure," an FAA statement said.

Each NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) affects a specific area. "No UAS [Unmanned Aircraft System] operations are authorized in the areas covered by this NOTAM" unless they have clearance for specific operations, the FAA said. Allowed operations include support for national defense, law enforcement, firefighting, and commercial operations "with a valid statement of work."

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Intel's Core Ultra 200S desktop processors—the company's biggest overhaul of its desktop platform since 2021—consume less power and run a lot cooler than the company's 13th- and 14th-generation Core CPUs. However, early reviewers found that the processors sometimes struggled to match, let alone beat, those older desktop CPUs in some tasks. This was particularly true for games, and people who build their own gaming PCs are a key constituency for these kinds of brand-new high-end chips.

Intel quickly blamed optimization issues for some of the problems, promising performance fixes sometime later in November or December, and the company has outlined the first batch of fixes in a lengthy support document. Of the five identified problems, Intel says it has fixed four; users can get those updates by installing Windows 11 24H2 build 26100.2161 or higher, updating their motherboard's BIOS to the latest version. Non-performance-related blue screens related to Epic's Easy Anti-Cheat software have also been resolved, and users should update to the latest version if they're still having issues.

The performance problems resolved via the Windows update are both related to a missing power plan specific to the Core Ultra processors—Intel didn't have those power plans ready for reviewers, who did all their testing using the generic power profiles provided with Windows. Intel said that this by itself could reduce performance by between 6 and 30 percent, depending on the software.

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Audi provided flights from Washington, DC, to San Francisco and accommodation so Ars could drive the Q6 and SQ6. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

HEALDSBURG, Calif.—Earlier this summer, Ars got its first drive of Audi's new Q6 e-tron on some very wet roads in Spain. Then, we were driving pre-production Q6s in Euro-spec. Now, the electric SUV is on sale in the US, with more power in the base model and six months more refinement for its software. But the venue change did not bring a change of weather—heavy rain was the order of the day, making me wonder if Audi is building its new electric vehicle on the site of an ancient rain god's temple?

Of all its rivals, Audi appears to have settled into a nomenclature for its vehicles that at least makes a little sense. Odd numbers are for internal combustion engines, even numbers for EVs, although it also appends "e-tron" on the end to make that entirely clear... and give francophones something to snicker about. (Yes, the e-tron GT does not fit into this schema, but nobody's perfect.)

The Q6 e-tron is also the most advanced EV to wear Audi's four rings. Built on a new architecture called PPE (premium platform electric), at its heart is an 800 V powertrain with a 100 kWh (94.4 kWh useable) lithium-ion battery pack that powers a permanently excited synchronous motor driving the rear wheels, and in the case of the quattro versions, an asynchronous motor. The electric motors have 30 percent less energy consumption than those used in the Q8 e-tron, and are smaller and lighter.

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