Ars Technica

The US DOGE Service's access to the private data of ordinary Americans and federal employees is being challenged in several lawsuits filed this week.

Three new complaints seek court orders that would stop the data access and require the deletion of unlawfully accessed data. Two of the complaints also seek financial damages for individuals whose data was accessed.

The US DOGE Service, Elon Musk, the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and OPM Acting Director Charles Ezell were named as defendants in one suit filed yesterday in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

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An outbreak of measles in one of Texas' least vaccinated counties continues to rapidly expand, with officials reporting 24 cases Tuesday, up from just nine confirmed on Friday.

According to an update by the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS), all 24 cases identified in the two-week-old outbreak are in unvaccinated people. Nine of the patients (37.5 percent) required hospitalization.

Most of the cases are in children. DSHS provided an age breakdown that listed six cases as being in infants and young children between the ages of 0 and 4. This is the age group most vulnerable to measles because they have a heightened risk of complications from the disease and may be too young to be fully vaccinated with the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine. Children are recommended to get two doses of the MMR vaccine, one between 12 and 15 months and the second between 4 and 6 years. One dose of MMR vaccine is estimated to be 93 percent effective against measles, while two doses are 97 percent effective.

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Apple services like iMessage and FaceTime often work exclusively on Apple’s hardware, something the company uses to keep customers inside its ecosystem and encourage people who buy one Apple product to buy other Apple products so they can keep using the features they like.

Apple’s streaming and media services have been an exception to this, going all the way back to iTunes for Windows—the company offers Apple Music on Android devices, for example, and Apple TV+ (the service) works on Roku devices, game consoles, and most other smart TVs. Even if people haven’t bought an iPhone or Mac, Apple’s fast-growing Services division relies on pulling in new subscribers regardless of the device they’re using to subscribe.

To that end, Apple announced today that it’s finally bringing an Apple TV+ app to Android devices for the first time since Apple TV+ launched in 2019. The app will work on all Android phones and tablets running Android 10 or newer and will be available today. The app will support both Apple TV+ subscriptions and subscriptions to Apple’s MLS Season Pass service for soccer fans.

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A teacher in high school once quoted an old proverb to me: "Do something you love, and you'll never work a day in your life!"

Perhaps 18-year-old Alan Filion encountered a similar teacher during his school years in California, because once Filion learned that he truly loved making fake "swatting" calls to law enforcement—well, he turned the crime into a job, using handles like "Nazgul Swattings" and "Third Reich of Kiwiswats." Originally it was all about the "power trip," but it soon became about "money and the power trip."

"Prices: $40-Gas leak/Fire for EMS/Fire/Gas Leak [$35 for returning customers]," Filion wrote in a 2023 advertisement that ran on various social media channels. "$50 for a major police response to the house [$40 for returning customers]; $75 for a bomb threat/mass shooting threat (they will shut down the school or public location for a day) [$60 for returning customers]. All swats will be done ASAP or present time."

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On Wednesday, a team of researchers announced that they got extremely lucky. The team is building a detector on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea that can identify those rare occasions when a neutrino happens to interact with the seawater nearby. And while the detector was only 10 percent of the size it will be on completion, it managed to pick up the most energetic neutrino ever detected.

For context, the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth, the Large Hadron Collider, accelerates protons to an energy of 7 Tera-electronVolts (TeV). The neutrino that was detected had an energy of at least 60 Peta-electronVolts, possibly hitting 230 PeV. That also blew away the previous records, which were in the neighborhood of 10 PeV.

Attempts to trace back the neutrino to a source make it clear that it originated outside our galaxy, although there are a number of candidate sources in the more distant Universe.

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Last night, Apple posted a new support document about migrating purchases between accounts, something that Apple users with long online histories have been waiting on for years, if not decades. If you have movies, music, or apps orphaned on various iTools/.Mac/MobileMe/iTunes accounts that preceded what you're using now, you can start the fairly involved process of moving them over.

"You can choose to migrate apps, music, and other content you’ve purchased from Apple on a secondary Apple Account to a primary Apple Account," the document reads, suggesting that people might have older accounts tied primarily to just certain movies, music, or other purchases that they can now bring forward to their primary, device-linked account. The process takes place on an iPhone or iPad inside the Settings app, in the "Media & Purchases" section in your named account section.

There are a few hitches to note. You can't migrate purchases from or into a child's account that exists inside Family Sharing. You can only migrate purchases to an account once a year. There are some complications if you have music libraries on both accounts and also if you have never used the primary account for purchases or downloads. And migration is not available in the EU, UK, or India.

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In early February, a dataset tracking car crash deaths in the US curiously went missing from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) website.

Unlike other Donald Trump-ordered changes to government websites in which entire studies were removed and later court-ordered to be restored, only the most recent data on car crash deaths from 2022 was deleted from download files on NHTSA's website.

The odd removal sparked concerns that the Trump administration may be changing or possibly even ending the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS)—a collection of police-reported data from every state that has tracked car crash fatalities since 1975. The Health department has said the data is used to help reduce deaths from not wearing a seatbelt or deaths involving a drunk driver.

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American roads have grown deadlier for everyone, but the toll on pedestrians has been disproportionate. From a record low in 2009, the number of pedestrians being killed by vehicles rose 83 percent by 2022 to the highest it's been in 40 years. During that time, overall traffic deaths increased by just 25 percent. Now, a new study from AAA has identified a number of common factors that can explain why so many more pedestrians have died.

Firstly, no, it's not because there are more SUVs on the road, although these larger and taller vehicles are more likely to kill or seriously injure a pedestrian in a crash. And no, it's not because everyone has a smartphone, although using one while driving is a good way to increase your chances of hitting someone or something. These and some other factors (increased amount of driving, more alcohol consumption) have each played a small role, but even together, they don't explain the magnitude of the trend.

For a while, researchers started seeing that the increased pedestrian death toll was almost entirely happening after dark and on urban arterial roads—this has continued to be true through 2022, the AAA report says.

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In the mid- and upper-latitudes on Earth, during the early evening hours, thin and wispy clouds can sometimes be observed in the upper atmosphere.

These clouds have an ethereal feel and consist of ice crystals in very high clouds at the edge of space, typically about 75 to 85 km above the surface. The clouds are still in sunlight while the ground is darkening after the Sun sets. Meteorologists call these noctilucent clouds, which essentially translates to "night-shining" clouds.

There is no reason why these clouds could not also exist on Mars, which has a thin atmosphere. And about two decades ago, the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter observed noctilucent clouds on Mars and went on to make a systematic study.

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Biomedical research in the US is world class in part because of a longstanding partnership between universities and the federal government.

On Feb. 7, 2025, the US National Institutes of Health issued a policy that could weaken the position of the United States as a global leader in scientific innovation by slashing funds to the infrastructure that allows universities and other institutions to conduct research in the first place.

Universities across the nation carry out research on behalf of the federal government. Central to this partnership is federal grant funding, which is awarded through a rigorous review process. These grants are the lifeblood of biomedical research in the US.

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After a relatively short period of just two and a half years, the chief of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, was dismissed from his position last week. The Kremlin announced he would be replaced by 39-year-old former Deputy Minister of Transport Dmitry Bakanov.

An economist by training, Bakanov has worked in the past for a satellite communications company named Gonets. However, he is largely an unknown entity to NASA as the US space agency continues to partner with Russia on the operation of the International Space Station.

NASA had developed a reasonably good relationship with Borisov, who brought a much more stable presence to the NASA-Roscosmos relationship after his pugnacious predecessor, Dmitry Rogozin, was sacked in 2022.

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The search for extraterrestrial life has always been a key motivator of space exploration. But if we were to search Mars, Titan, or the subsurface oceans of Europa or Enceladus, it seems like all we can reasonably hope to find is extremophile microbes. And microbes, just a few microns long and wide, will be difficult to identify if we’re relying on robots working with limited human supervision and without all the fancy life-detecting gear we have here on Earth.

To solve that problem, a team of German researchers at the Technical University in Berlin figured that, instead of having a robot looking for microbes, it would be easier and cheaper to make the microbes come to the robot. The only ingredient they were lacking was the right bait.

Most ideas we have for life detection on space mission rely on looking for chemical traces of life, such as various metabolites. Most recent missions, the Perseverance rover included, weren’t equipped with any specialized life-detecting instruments. “On Mars, the focus was on looking for signs of possible ancient life—fossils or other traces of microbes,” says Max Riekeles, an astrobiologist at the Technical University Berlin. “The last real in-situ life detection missions were performed by Viking landers, which is quite a while back already,”

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Micro LED has become one of the most anticipated display technologies for consumer products in recent years. Using self-emissive LEDs as pixels, the backlight-free displays combine the contrast-rich capabilities of OLED with the brightness and durability potential of LCD-LED displays, and they avoid burn-in issues.

We're often asked about the future of Micro LED and when display enthusiasts can realistically expect to own a TV or monitor with the technology. Here's the latest on the highly anticipated—and still elusive—display technology.

Micro LED is still years away from being suitable for mass production of consumer products, as the industry is struggling to manage obstacles like manufacturing costs and competition from other advanced display tech like OLED. Micro LED TVs are currently available for purchase, but they cost six figures, making them unattainable for the vast majority of people.

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For many of us, we dread software updates to our favorite gadgets. Updates to a beloved gadget can leave us outraged, whether it's because we're frustrated with bugs or we're Luddites and tech enthusiasts averse to change.

In addition to those frustrations, there are times when gadget makers use software updates to manipulate product functionality and seriously upend owners' abilities to use their property as expected. We’ve all seen software updates render gadgets absolutely horrible: Printers have nearly become a four-letter word as the industry infamously issues updates that brick third-party ink and scanning capabilities. We've also seen company updates that locked features behind a paywall or removed them entirely. This type of behavior has caused users to be wary of software updates in fear that they will diminish the value of already-purchased hardware.

On the other hand, there are times when software updates enrich the capabilities of smart gadgets. These updates are the types of things that can help devices retain or improve their value, last longer, and become less likely to turn into e-waste.

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The re-election of President Trump has had a noticeable effect on the way many CEOs are running their businesses. Programs to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion are being canceled, and seven-figure checks were sent to his inauguration fund by CEOs like Apple's Tim Cook. The behavior from the Oval Office is mirrored by the rest of the administration, which is why it was a little surprising to see the CEO of a major company speak out against current US government policies. But that's exactly what Ford President and CEO Jim Farley has done.

Speaking at a conference, Farley said that "President Trump has talked a lot about making our US auto industry stronger," but that "so far what we're seeing is a lot of cost and chaos," reported Automotive News.

During the election, Trump promised to enact heavy tariffs on a wide range of imports from countries across the globe. Among those particularly targeted were Canada and Mexico. The two countries share borders with the US and, for many years, were joined in a free-trade association that encouraged US companies to set up factories in Canada and Mexico to take advantage of lower wages.

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In the nascent field of AI hacking, indirect prompt injection has become a basic building block for inducing chatbots to exfiltrate sensitive data or perform other malicious actions. Developers of platforms such as Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT are generally good at plugging these security holes, but hackers keep finding new ways to poke through them again and again.

On Monday, researcher Johann Rehberger demonstrated a new way to override prompt injection defenses Google developers have built into Gemini—specifically, defenses that restrict the invocation of Google Workspace or other sensitive tools when processing untrusted data, such as incoming emails or shared documents. The result of Rehberger’s attack is the permanent planting of long-term memories that will be present in all future sessions, opening the potential for the chatbot to act on false information or instructions in perpetuity.

More about the attack later. For now, here is a brief review of indirect prompt injections: Prompts in the context of large language models (LLMs) are instructions, provided either by the chatbot developers or by the person using the chatbot, to perform tasks, such as summarizing an email or drafting a reply. But what if this content contains a malicious instruction? It turns out that chatbots are so eager to follow instructions that they often take their orders from such content, even though there was never an intention for it to act as a prompt.

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A federal judge today, February 11, gave the Trump administration until 11:59 pm tonight to restore public documents and datasets that were abruptly removed or altered from federal health websites to comply with an executive order on gender ideology.

Information was taken down from websites for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration following a January 29 memo from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The memo ordered all agencies to remove any public-facing media that "inculcate or promote gender ideology" that would violate an executive order President Trump signed on January 20. OPM gave agencies until just January 31 to comply.

The webpages that were subsequently removed include key guidance and data on health risks in youth, school health policies, social vulnerability, environmental justice, HIV testing and prevention, assisted reproductive technologies, contraceptives, and recommendations for improving clinical studies, among other essential information.

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Verizon has defeated a lawsuit filed by a utility pole worker who claims that lead cables made him sick.

A federal judge on Friday granted Verizon's motion to dismiss the complaint, which sought class action status on behalf of other utility pole workers. However, the judge said the plaintiff may have standing to bring his claims in state court instead of federal court.

The lawsuit was filed in US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania in September 2023, about two months after a Wall Street Journal report said that at least 2,000 lead-covered telephone cables installed decades ago by multiple phone companies had not been removed.

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Google's Chrome browser might soon get a useful security upgrade: detecting passwords used in data breaches and then generating and storing a better replacement. Google's preliminary copy suggests it's an "AI innovation," though exactly how is unclear.

Noted software digger Leopeva64 on X found a new offering in the AI settings of a very early build of Chrome. The option, "Automated password Change" (so, early stages—as to not yet get a copyedit), is described as, "When Chrome finds one of your passwords in a data breach, it can offer to change your password for you when you sign in."

Chrome already has a feature that warns users if the passwords they enter have been identified in a breach and will prompt them to change it. As noted by Windows Report, the change is that now Google will offer to change it for you on the spot rather than simply prompting you to handle that elsewhere. The password is automatically saved in Google's Password Manager and "is encrypted and never seen by anyone," the settings page claims.

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A dairy worker in Nevada has been infected with a strain of H5N1 bird flu—genotype D1.1—that has newly spilled over to cows, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed.

The worker experienced conjunctivitis (pink eye) as the only symptom and is recovering, according to a separate press release by the Central Nevada Health District Monday.

The bird flu strain H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b, genotype D1.1 is the predominant strain currently circulating in wild birds in North America and was confirmed for the first time in cows in Nevada last week. According to the US Department of Agriculture, the new spillover was initially detected on January 31 via bulk milk testing. Until this point, the outbreak of H5N1 in dairy cows—which was declared in March 2024—was entirely caused by H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b, genotype B3.13. The outbreak was thought to have been caused by a single spillover event from wild birds to cows in Texas in late 2023 or early 2024.

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