Kelly Newman – Page 8

With deadline looming, 4 of 9 universities reject Trump’s “compact” to remake higher ed

culture, education, higher ed, Trump / Kelly Newman / October 18, 2025

Earlier this month, the Trump administration made nine elite universities an offer they couldn’t refuse: bring in more conservatives while shutting down “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” give up control of admissions and hiring decisions, agree to “biological” definitions of sex and gender, don’t raise tuition for five years, clamp down on student protests, and stay institutionally “neutral” on current events. Do this and you won’t be cut off from “federal benefits,” which could include research funding, student loans, federal contracts, and even student and faculty immigration visas. Instead, you may gain “substantial and meaningful federal grants.”

But the universities are refusing. With the initial deadline of October 20 approaching, four of the nine universities—the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, University of Southern California, and MIT—that received the federal “compact” have announced that they will not sign it.

In addition, the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 colleges and universities, today issued a statement calling for the compact to be completely withdrawn.

The compact would “impose unprecedented litmus tests on colleges and universities as a condition for receiving ill-defined ‘federal benefits’ related to funding and grants,” the statement says, and goes on to add that “it offers nothing less than government control of a university’s basic and necessary freedoms—the freedoms to decide who we teach, what we teach, and who teaches… The compact is just the kind of excessive federal overreach and regulation, to the detriment of state and local input and control, that this administration says it is against.”

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Ring cameras are about to get increasingly chummy with law enforcement

Amazon, privacy, ring, Smart Home, Tech / Kelly Newman / October 18, 2025

Amazon’s Ring partners with company whose tech has reportedly been used by ICE.

Ring’s Outdoor Cam Pro. Credit: Amazon

Law enforcement agencies will soon have easier access to footage captured by Amazon’s Ring smart cameras. In a partnership announced this week, Amazon will allow approximately 5,000 local law enforcement agencies to request access to Ring camera footage via surveillance platforms from Flock Safety. Ring cooperating with law enforcement and the reported use of Flock technologies by federal agencies, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has resurfaced privacy concerns that have followed the devices for years.

According to Flock’s announcement, its Ring partnership allows local law enforcement members to use Flock software “to send a direct post in the Ring Neighbors app with details about the investigation and request voluntary assistance.” Requests must include “specific location and timeframe of the incident, a unique investigation code, and details about what is being investigated,” and users can look at the requests anonymously, Flock said.

“Any footage a Ring customer chooses to submit will be securely packaged by Flock and shared directly with the requesting local public safety agency through the FlockOS or Flock Nova platform,” the announcement reads.

Flock said its local law enforcement users will gain access to Ring Community Requests in “the coming months.”

A flock of privacy concerns

Outside its software platforms, Flock is known for license plate recognition cameras. Flock customers can also search footage from Flock cameras using descriptors to find people, such as “man in blue shirt and cowboy hat.” Besides law enforcement agencies, Flock says 6,000 communities and 1,000 businesses use their products.

For years, privacy advocates have warned against companies like Flock.

This week, US Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter [PDF] to Flock CEO Garrett Langley saying that ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the Secret Service, and the US Navy’s Criminal Investigative Service have had access to footage from Flock’s license plate cameras.

“I now believe that abuses of your product are not only likely but inevitable and that Flock is unable and uninterested in preventing them,” Wyden wrote.

In August, Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, wrote that “Flock is building a dangerous, nationwide mass-surveillance infrastructure.” Stanley pointed to ICE using Flock’s network of cameras, as well as Flock’s efforts to build a people lookup tool with data brokers.

Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Ars via email that Flock is a “mass surveillance tool” that “has increasingly been used to spy on both immigrants and people exercising their First Amendment-protected rights.”

Flock has earned this reputation among privacy advocates through its own cameras, not Ring’s.

An Amazon spokesperson told Ars Technica that only local public safety agencies will be able to make Community Requests via Flock software, and that requests will also show the name of the agency making the request.

A Flock spokesperson told Ars:

Flock does not currently have any contracts with any division of [the US Department of Homeland Security], including ICE. The Ring Community Requests process through Flock is only available for local public safety agencies for specific, active investigations. All requests are time and geographically-bound. Ring users can choose to share relevant footage or ignore the request.

Flock’s rep added that all activity within FlockOS and Flock Nova is “permanently recorded in a comprehensive CJIS-compliant audit trail for unalterable custody tracking,” referring to a set of standards created by the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services division.

But there’s still concern that federal agencies will end up accessing Ring footage through Flock. Guariglia told Ars:

Even without formal partnerships with federal authorities, data from these surveillance companies flow to agencies like ICE through local law enforcement. Local and state police have run more than 4,000 Flock searches on behalf of federal authorities or with a potential immigration focus, reporting has found. Additionally, just this month, it became clear that Texas police searched 83,000 Flock cameras in an attempt to prosecute a woman for her abortion and then tried to cover it up.

Ring cozies up to the law

This week’s announcement shows Amazon, which acquired Ring in 2018, increasingly positioning its consumer cameras as a law enforcement tool. After years of cops using Ring footage, Amazon last year said that it would stop letting police request Ring footage—unless it was an “emergency”—only to reverse course about 18 months later by allowing police to request Ring footage through a Flock rival, Axon.

While announcing Ring’s deals with Flock and Axon, Ring founder and CEO Jamie Siminoff claimed that the partnerships would help Ring cameras keep neighborhoods safe. But there’s doubt as to whether people buy Ring cameras to protect their neighborhood.

“Ring’s new partnership with Flock shows that the company is more interested in contributing to mounting authoritarianism than servicing the specific needs of their customers,” Guariglia told Ars.

Interestingly, Ring initiated conversations about a deal with Flock, Langely told CNBC.

Flock says that its cameras don’t use facial recognition, which has been criticized for racial biases. But local law enforcement agencies using Flock will soon have access to footage from Ring cameras with facial recognition. In a conversation with The Washington Post this month, Calli Schroeder, senior counsel at the consumer advocacy and policy group Electronic Privacy Information Center, described the new feature for Ring cameras as “invasive for anyone who walks within range of” a Ring doorbell, since they likely haven’t consented to facial recognition being used on them.

Amazon, for its part, has mostly pushed the burden of ensuring responsible facial recognition use to its customers. Schroeder shared concern with the Post that Ring’s facial recognition data could end up being shared with law enforcement.

Some people who are perturbed about Ring deepening its ties with law enforcement have complained online.

“Inviting big brother into the system. Screw that,” a user on the Ring subreddit said this week.

Another Reddit user said: “And… I’m gone. Nope, NO WAY IN HELL. Goodbye, Ring. I’ll be switching to a UniFi[-brand] system with 100 percent local storage. You don’t get my money any more. This is some 1984 BS …”

Privacy concerns are also exacerbated by Ring’s past, as the company has previously failed to meet users’ privacy expectations. In 2023, Ring agreed to pay $5.8 million to settle claims that employees illegally spied on Ring customers.

Amazon and Flock say their collaboration will only involve voluntary customers and local enforcement agencies. But there’s still reason to be concerned about the implications of people sending doorbell and personal camera footage to law enforcement via platforms that are reportedly widely used by federal agencies for deportation purposes. Combined with the privacy issues that Ring has already faced for years, it’s not hard to see why some feel that Amazon scaling up Ring’s association with any type of law enforcement is unacceptable.

And it appears that Amazon and Flock would both like Ring customers to opt in when possible.

“It will be turned on for free for every customer, and I think all of them will use it,” Langely told CNBC.

Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She’s been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.

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OnePlus unveils OxygenOS 16 update with deep Gemini integration

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Gemini, Google, OnePlus, smartphones, Tech / Kelly Newman / October 18, 2025

The updated Android software expands what you can add to Mind Space and uses Gemini. For starters, you can add scrolling screenshots and voice memos up to 60 seconds in length. This provides more data for the AI to generate content. For example, if you take screenshots of hotel listings and airline flights, you can tell Gemini to use your Mind Space content to create a trip itinerary. This will be fully integrated with the phone and won’t require a separate subscription to Google’s AI tools.

Mind Space isn’t a totally new idea—it’s quite similar to AI features like Nothing’s Essential Space and Google’s Pixel Screenshots and Journal. The idea is that if you give an AI model enough data on your thoughts and plans, it can provide useful insights. That’s still hypothetical based on what we’ve seen from other smartphone OEMs, but that’s not stopping OnePlus from fully embracing AI in Android 16.

In addition to beefing up Mind Space, OxygenOS 16 will also add system-wide AI writing tools, which is another common AI add-on. Like the systems from Apple, Google, and Samsung, you will be able to use the OnePlus writing tools to adjust text, proofread, and generate summaries.

OnePlus will make OxygenOS 16 available starting October 17 as an open beta. You’ll need a OnePlus device from the past three years to run the software, both in the beta phase and when it’s finally released. As for that, OnePlus hasn’t offered a specific date. The initial OxygenOS 16 release will be with the OnePlus 15 devices, with releases for other supported phones and tablets coming later.

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SpaceX has plans to launch Falcon Heavy from California—if anyone wants it to

Commercial space, falcon 9, falcon heavy, launch, military space, Science, slc-6, Space, space force, spacex, Vandenberg space force base / Kelly Newman / October 16, 2025

There’s more to the changes at Vandenberg than launching additional rockets. The authorization gives SpaceX the green light to redevelop Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6) to support Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy missions. SpaceX plans to demolish unneeded structures at SLC-6 (pronounced “Slick 6”) and construct two new landing pads for Falcon boosters on a bluff overlooking the Pacific just south of the pad.

SpaceX currently operates from a single pad at Vandenberg—Space Launch Complex 4-East (SLC-4E)—a few miles north of the SLC-6 location. The SLC-4E location is not configured to launch the Falcon Heavy, an uprated rocket with three Falcon 9 boosters bolted together.

SLC-6, cocooned by hills on three sides and flanked by the ocean to the west, is no stranger to big rockets. It was first developed for the Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory program in the 1960s, when the military wanted to put a mini-space station into orbit for astronauts to spy on the Soviet Union. Crews readied the complex to launch military astronauts on top of Titan rockets, but the Pentagon canceled the program in 1969 before anything actually launched from SLC-6.

NASA and the Air Force then modified SLC-6 to launch space shuttles. The space shuttle Enterprise was stacked vertically at SLC-6 for fit checks in 1985, but the Air Force abandoned the Vandenberg-based shuttle program after the Challenger accident in 1986. The launch facility sat mostly dormant for nearly two decades until Boeing, and then United Launch Alliance, took over SLC-6 and began launching Delta IV rockets there in 2006.

The space shuttle Enterprise stands vertically at Space Launch Complex-6 at Vandenberg. NASA used the shuttle for fit checks at the pad, but it never launched from California. Credit: NASA

ULA launched its last Delta IV Heavy rocket from California in 2022, leaving the future of SLC-6 in question. ULA’s new rocket, the Vulcan, will launch from a different pad at Vandenberg. Space Force officials selected SpaceX in 2023 to take over the pad and prepare it to launch the Falcon Heavy, which has the lift capacity to carry the military’s most massive satellites into orbit.

No big rush

Progress at SLC-6 has been slow. It took nearly a year to prepare the Environmental Impact Statement. In reality, there’s no big rush to bring SLC-6 online. SpaceX has no Falcon Heavy missions from Vandenberg in its contract backlog, but the company is part of the Pentagon’s stable of launch providers. To qualify as a member of the club, SpaceX must have the capability to launch the Space Force’s heaviest missions from the military’s spaceports at Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral, Florida.

SpaceX has plans to launch Falcon Heavy from California—if anyone wants it to Read More »

Thousands of customers imperiled after nation-state ransacks F5’s network

big-ip, Biz & IT, breach, f5, Security / Kelly Newman / October 16, 2025

Customers position BIG-IP at the very edge of their networks for use as load balancers and firewalls, and for inspection and encryption of data passing into and out of networks. Given BIG-IP’s network position and its role in managing traffic for web servers, previous compromises have allowed adversaries to expand their access to other parts of an infected network.

F5 said that investigations by two outside intrusion-response firms have yet to find any evidence of supply-chain attacks. The company attached letters from firms IOActive and NCC Group attesting that analyses of source code and build pipeline uncovered no signs that a “threat actor modified or introduced any vulnerabilities into the in-scope items.” The firms also said they didn’t identify any evidence of critical vulnerabilities in the system. Investigators, which also included Mandiant and CrowdStrike, found no evidence that data from its CRM, financial, support case management, or health systems was accessed.

The company released updates for its BIG-IP, F5OS, BIG-IQ, and APM products. CVE designations and other details are here. Two days ago, F5 rotated BIG-IP signing certificates, though there was no immediate confirmation that the move is in response to the breach.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency has warned that federal agencies that rely on the appliance face an “imminent threat” from the thefts, which “pose an unacceptable risk.” The agency went on to direct federal agencies under its control to take “emergency action.” The UK’s National Cyber Security Center issued a similar directive.

CISA has ordered all federal agencies it oversees to immediately take inventory of all BIG-IP devices in networks they run or in networks that outside providers run on their behalf. The agency went on to direct agencies to install the updates and follow a threat-hunting guide that F5 has also issued. BIG-IP users in private industry should do the same.

Thousands of customers imperiled after nation-state ransacks F5’s network Read More »

CDC tormented: HR workers summoned from furlough to lay off themselves, others

CDC, health, Trump / Kelly Newman / October 16, 2025

Traumatized CDC has lost 33% of its workforce this year, union says.

ATLANTA, GEORGIA – AUGUST 9: Bullet holes are seen in windows at the Centers For Disease Control (CDC) Global Headquarters following a shooting that left two dead, on August 9, 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia. On August 8, a gunman opened fire near the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control, killing a DeKalb County Police Department officer before being found dead by gunfire. Credit: Getty | Elijah Nouvelage

The dust is still settling at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after a mass layoff on Friday, which former employees at the beleaguered agency are describing as a massacre.

In separate press briefings on Tuesday, a network of terminated CDC staff that goes by the name the National Public Health Coalition, and the union representing employees at the agency discussed what the wide-scale cuts mean for the American people, as well as the trauma, despair, and damage they have wreaked on the workers of the once-premier public health agency.

In a normal federal layoff—called a reduction in force, or RIF—the agency would be given a full outline of the roles and branches or divisions affected, as well as some explanation for the cuts, such as alleged fraud, abuse, or redundancy. However, the Trump administration has provided no such information or explanation, leaving current and former employees to essentially crowdsource what has been lost and only guess at the possible reasons.

The numbers

The union representing CDC workers, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 2883, has been assessing the cuts since termination emails began arriving in employee inboxes late Friday. The union estimates that the Trump administration sent termination notices to 1,300 CDC employees on Friday, in what they called an illegal “politically-motivated stunt.” Of those 1,300 terminations, around 700 were rescinded, beginning on Saturday.

The Trump administration said the 700 rescinded terminations were sent due to a “coding error.” But CDC workers didn’t buy that explanation, saying all the terminations were intentional, and some were only reversed after backlash erupted when people realized what the administration was trying to cut—for example, terminating the experts responding to domestic measles outbreaks and those responding to an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who received RIF notices that were later rescinded. Still, with the rescissions, some 600 terminations appear to remain.

In all, the union estimated that the CDC has lost 33 percent of its workforce since the start of the Trump administration. In January, there were roughly 13,000 CDC workers total. Since then, about 3,000 have been fully separated from the agency, including 600 laid off in a RIF on April 1, and 2,400 who were either fired or forced out amid pressure campaigns. An additional 1,300 have been laid off but are not yet fully separated from the agency; they remain on paid administrative leave but are unable to do their work.

In the RIF Friday, laid-off employees said they were given notices that list their termination effective date as December 8, leaving a 60-day period in which they would be on administrative leave.

The RIF was carried out amid an ongoing government shutdown over a health care funding dispute, and the Trump administration has claimed that the RIF is a consequence of the shutdown. But the union, along with federal employment lawyers and even some senior government officials, say a RIF during a shutdown is illegal; a temporary lapse in government funding is not a legitimate reason for a RIF under federal regulations, and it runs afoul of a federal law that prohibits the government from incurring new costs during a shutdown, such as by promising severance packages.

Brutal cuts

In practice, a RIF amid a shutdown added more trauma to the demoralized staff. In opening remarks, Local AFGE 2883 President Yolanda Jacobs noted that the CDC Human Resources staff had been furloughed during the shutdown but were temporarily brought back into work just so they could process termination letters—including their own. A terminated CDC employee who spoke on condition of anonymity said that more than 90 percent of the HR staff is now gone.

Among the terminations were also mental health workers who were helping CDC staff recover from an August attack, in which a gunman fired over 500 rounds at CDC buildings full of agency employees and killed a local police officer.

Another terminated CDC worker who spoke on the condition of anonymity discussed the personal toll of the RIF. She had worked at the agency for over two decades and learned of her termination Friday night as she was doing dishes after making homemade pizza with her family—money worries kept them from ordering out. Her phone “started going crazy” as coworkers were checking in after receiving their RIF notices. She dug out her work laptop, which had been set aside since she was furloughed, to find her own RIF notice at the top of her inbox.

As text messages continued to come in through the night, she said it was “heartbreaking and devastating” when she realized the Trump administration was “actually dismantling us.”

“These are just hardworking Americans who just want to do their job, who just want to help people, who want to make sure the correct information is out there [and] that we are preventing things from happening,” she said.

Since the RIF has sunk in, she has started to worry more for her family and their finances. During the furlough, paychecks are uncertain. And her effective termination date in December will land between holidays, when hiring is slow. She worried about affording Christmas presents for her family.

She also said that staff have asked about getting other jobs while on administrative leave but were told that in order to do that, they would need to get approval from the CDC’s ethics office to ensure there were no conflicts of interest. But staff can’t actually do that because everyone at the ethics office also got RIF notices.

Losses

Throughout the briefings yesterday, staff highlighted that the RIF did not just trim here and there, as one might expect with cuts designed to make the organization leaner. Instead, it lopped off entire teams and branches, completely shutting down whole lines of work.

One former CDC employee spoke broadly of big hits to experts in chronic disease, global health, and the National Center for Health Statistics, which runs critical data collection that states and local health departments rely on. The CDC’s library staff are all gone. Suicide prevention experts have been cut, as well as communications and policy staff, who develop briefings and provide information to Congress members.

Abigail Tighe, a former CDC employee with National Public Health Coalition, tried to put the cuts in context, saying: “We are losing the people with all the knowledge to prevent childhood drownings, child abuse, and suicide. We’re losing the experts who help us track and understand the health and safety needs of our communities [and] the brave and brilliant professionals who, on a moment’s notice, respond to new and unknown outbreaks across the world. And that’s just a few examples.”

A terminated scientist who spoke on condition of anonymity said that her entire office was eliminated in the RIF. “My heart breaks for my colleagues and friends who have been tormented, traumatized, shot at, threatened daily. These are kind, hardworking, thoughtful people whose lives are being overturned,” she said.

But, “ultimately,” she said, “I am terrified for the public safety of our country.”

Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.

CDC tormented: HR workers summoned from furlough to lay off themselves, others Read More »

Apple unveils M5 update for the 11- and 13-inch iPad Pros

Apple, Apple M5, Apple silicon, ipad pro, Tech / Kelly Newman / October 15, 2025

A couple of weeks ago, a YouTuber unboxed what appeared to be a refreshed iPad Pro in full retail packaging, suggesting it would be launching imminently. Today, Apple formally announced the new tablets, and it looks like pretty much everything uncovered by that YouTuber turned out to be accurate.

The new iPad Pros, powered by Apple’s also-new M5 chip, use the same basic designs as the M4 iPad Pros from last year and are compatible with the same cases and accessories. The new iPad Pro starts at $999 for the 11-inch model and $1,299 for the 13-inch model, is available for pre-order today, and ships on October 22.

Apple’s M5 is similar in composition to the M4—the fully enabled version uses four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine. But a memory bandwidth increase, from 120GB/s for the M4 to 153GB/s for the M5, enables a disproportionately large 45 percent increase to graphics performance, according to Apple’s estimates. Apple’s press release also highlighted improvements to storage performance, with “up to 2x faster storage read and write speeds.”

Apple unveils M5 update for the 11- and 13-inch iPad Pros Read More »

ROG Xbox Ally X: The Ars Technica review

Features, gaming, Handheld Gaming, microsoft, ROG Ally, xbox ally, xbox rog ally / Kelly Newman / October 15, 2025

You got Xbox in my portable gaming PC

The first portable “Xbox” fails to unify a messy world of competing PC gaming platforms.

The ROG Ally X sure looks great floating in a void… Credit: Asus

Here at Ars, we have been writing about rumors of a portable Xbox for literal decades now. With the ROG Xbox Ally, Microsoft has finally made those rumors a reality in the weirdest, most Microsoft way possible.

Yes, the $600 ROG Xbox Ally—and its souped-up cousin, the $1,000, ridiculous-mouthful-of-a-name ROG Xbox Ally X, which we tested—are the first official handheld hardware to sport the Xbox brand name. But Microsoft isn’t taking the exclusive-heavy, walled garden software approach that it has been committed to for nearly 25 years of Xbox home consoles. Instead, the ROG Xbox Ally is, at its base, simply a new version of Asus’ Windows-based ROG Ally line with an Xbox-flavored coat of paint.

That coat of paint—what Microsoft is calling the Xbox Full-screen Experience (FSE)—represents the company’s belated attempt to streamline the Windows gaming experience to be a bit more console-like in terms of user interface and overall simplicity. While that’s a worthy vision, the execution in these early days is so spotty and riddled with annoyances that it’s hard to recommend over the SteamOS-based competition.

Promises, promises

When Microsoft announced the ROG Xbox Ally this summer, the company promised that what it was calling a new “Xbox Experience for Handheld” would “minimize background activity and defer non-essential tasks” usually present in Windows, meaning “more [and] higher framerates” for gaming. While this is technically true, the performance improvement is so small as to be almost meaningless in practice.

In our testing, in-game benchmarks running under the Xbox Full Screen Experience were ever so slightly faster than those same benchmarks running under the full Windows 11 in Desktop Mode (which you can switch to with a few button presses on the ROG Xbox Ally). And when we say “ever so slightly,” we mean less than a single frame per second improvement in many cases and only one or two frames per second at most. Even on a percentage basis, the difference will be practically unnoticeable.

Comparing ROG Xbox Ally X benchmarks on the Xbox Full-screen Experience (FSE) and the standard Windows 11 desktop. Here’s Doom: The Dark Ages. Kyle Orland

The other major selling point of Microsoft’s Xbox FSE, as sold this summer, is an “aggregated gaming library” that includes “all of the games available on Windows” in one single mega-launcher interface. That means apps like Steam, Battle.net, GOG Galaxy, Ubisoft Connect, and EA Play can all be installed with just a click from the “My Apps” section of the FSE from the first launch.

The integration of these apps into the wider Xbox FSE is spotty at best, though. For one, the new “aggregate gaming library” can’t actually show you every game you own across all of these PC gaming platforms in one place. Choosing the “installable” games filter on the Xbox FSE only shows you the games you can access through Microsoft’s own Xbox platform (including any Xbox Game Pass subscription). For other platforms, you must still browse and install the games you own through their own apps, each with their own distinct interfaces that don’t always play well with the ROG Xbox Ally’s button-based controls.

The home screen shows your most recent titles while also offering some ads for other available titles. Kyle Orland / Asus

Even games that are supposed to be installable directly via the Xbox FSE caused me problems in testing. Trying to load the EA Play app to install any number of games included with Xbox Game Pass, for instance, triggered an “authentication error” page with no option to actually log in to EA’s servers. This problem persisted across multiple restarts and reinstallations of the extension that’s supposed to link EA Play to the Xbox FSE. And while I could load the EA Play app via Desktop Mode, I couldn’t get the app to recognize that I had an active Xbox Game Pass subscription to grant me access to the titles I wanted. So much for testing Battlefield, I guess.

Mo’ launchers, mo’ problems

Once you’ve gone to the trouble of installing your favorite games on the ROG Xbox Ally, the Xbox FSE does a good job of aggregating their listings in a single common interface. For players whose gaming libraries are spread across multiple platforms, it can be genuinely useful to see an FSE game list where Battle.net’s Hearthstone sits next to a GOG copy of Cyberpunk 2077, a Steam copy of Hades II, and an Epic Games Store copy of Fortnite, for instance. A quick tap of the Xbox button will even show you the last three games you played, regardless of where you launched them (alongside quick access to some useful general settings).

The “My Games” listing shows everything you’ve installed, regardless of the source. Credit: Kyle Orland / Asus

Unfortunately, actually playing those games via the new Xbox FSE is far from a seamless experience. You never quite know what you’re going to get when you hit the large, green “Play” button to launch a third-party platform via the Xbox FSE. All too frequently, in fact, you’ll get no immediate outward sign for multiple seconds that you did anything, leaving you to wonder if your button press even registered.

In the best case, this long wait will eventually culminate in a separate launcher popping up and eventually loading your game (or possibly popping up and down multiple times as it cycles through necessary launcher updates). In a slightly annoying case, the launcher might require you to close some pop-up and/or manually hit another on-screen button to launch the game (if you’re playing with the console docked to a TV, this may be downright impossible without a mouse plugged in). In the worst case, the wait might stretch to 30 seconds or more before you think to check the App Switcher and realize that Battle.net actually launched in the background and is waiting for you to input your username and password (to cite just one of many frustratingly counterintuitive examples I encountered).

Tapping the Xbox button brings up this helpful overlay no matter where you are in a game or app. Kyle Orland / Asus

Sometimes, switching from one active game to another via the handy Xbox button will pop up a warning that you should close the first game before opening a new one. Quite often, though, that pop-up warning simply fails to appear, forcing you to go to the trouble of manually closing the first game if you don’t want it eating up resources in the background. But in cases where you do want to multitask—downloading a game on Steam while playing something via the Epic Games Store, for instance—you can never be quite sure if the background app will actually keep doing what you want when it isn’t in focus via the FSE. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.

There are plenty of other little annoyances that make using the Xbox FSE more painful than it should be. Sometimes the system will swap between third-party launchers or between a launcher and the Xbox FSE for seemingly no reason, interrupting your flow. When the Xbox app itself needs updating, it does so via the desktop version of the Windows Update settings menu, which isn’t really designed for controllers (but which will offer to let you install the latest version of Notepad). Sometimes, Steam’s Big Picture Mode would have the very top and bottom of the full-screen interface cut off for no apparent reason. The system will frequently freeze on a menu for multiple seconds and refuse to respond to any input, especially when loading or closing an outside launcher. I could go on.

If you want to update the Xbox app itself, you still have to go through this Windows Update screen outside of the FSE. Credit: Kyle Orland / Asus

I’m willing to cut Microsoft a bit of slack here. It’s hard to bring the fragmented landscape of competing PC gaming platforms and storefronts together into a single unified interface that provides a cohesive user experience. In a sense, Microsoft is trapped in that XKCD comic where people complain about 14 different competing standards and end up creating a 15th competing standard in the process of trying to unify them.

At the same time, Microsoft sold the Xbox FSE largely on the promise of an “aggregated gaming library” that makes this all simple. Instead, the Full-screen Experience we got papers over the fragmented nature of Windows gaming while causing new problems all their own.

A powerful machine

Xbox FSE aside, there’s a lot to like about the ROG Xbox Ally line from a hardware design perspective. I tested the ROG Xbox Ally X, which is a little thicker and heavier than the Steam Deck but ends up riding that fine line between “solidly built” and “dense brick” pretty well in the hands.

Out of the box. Kyle Orland

I was especially impressed with the design of the ROG Xbox Ally’s hand grips, textured ovoid bumps that slot perfectly into the crook of the palm for comfortable extended gaming sessions. The overall build quality shines through, too, from nicely springy analog sticks and shoulder triggers to extremely powerful, bass-heavy speakers and excellently clicky face buttons (which can be a bit loud when playing next to a sleeping partner). There are also some nice rear buttons that are incredibly easy to nudge with a small flick of your middle finger, if you’re one of those people who never wants to move your thumbs off the analog sticks.

The ROG Xbox Ally’s 7-inch 1080p screen is crisp enough and looks especially nice when delivering steady 120 fps performance on games like Hollow Knight: Silksong. But the maximum brightness of 500 nits is a bit dim if you’re going to be playing in direct sunlight. I also found myself missing the deep blacks and pop of HDR color I’ve gotten used to on my Steam Deck OLED.

The AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip in the ROG Xbox Ally X delivers all the relative gaming horsepower you’d hope for from a $1,000 PC gaming handheld. I was able to hit 30 fps or more running a recent release like Doom: The Dark Ages at 1080p and High graphical settings. For a slightly older game like Cyberpunk 2077, the chip could even handle the “Ray-tracing Low” graphics preset at 1080p resolution at an acceptable frame rate when plugged into an outlet.

If you’re away from a power source, though, pushing the hardware for high-end graphical performance like that does take its toll on the battery. Titles that required the hardware’s preset “Turbo Mode”—which tends to run the noisy fan at full blast to keep internal temperature reasonable—could drain a fully charged battery in around two hours in the worst case. Switching over to the power-sipping but less graphically powerful Silent Mode (which can be accessed with a single button press using a handy “Armoury Crate Command Center” overlay) will extend that to about five or six hours of play time at the expense of the frame rate for high-end games.

The SteamOS elephant in the room

In a bubble, it would be easy to see the ROG Xbox Ally X as a promising, if flawed, early attempt to merge the simplicity of console gaming with the openness of PC gaming in a nice handheld form factor. Here in the real world, though, we’ve been enjoying a much more refined version of that same idea via Valve’s SteamOS and Steam Deck for years.

With SteamOS, I don’t need to worry about which launcher I’ll use to install or update a game. I don’t need to manually close background programs or wait multiple seconds to see an on-screen response when I hit the “Play” button. I don’t need to worry about whether a Settings menu will require me to use a mouse or touchscreen. Everything just works on SteamOS in a way I can’t rely on with the Xbox FSE.

Yes, Microsoft can brag that the Xbox FSE supports every Windows game, while SteamOS is limited to Valve’s walled garden. But this is barely an advantage for many if not most PC gamers, who have been launching their games via Steam more or less exclusively for decades now. Even companies with their own platforms and launchers often offer compatible versions of their biggest titles on Steam these days, a tacit acknowledgement of the social-network lock-in Valve has over the market for whole generations of PC gamers.

The Xbox “Full Screen Experience” can also be a windowed experience from the Windows desktop. Credit: Kyle Orland / Asus

Sure, the ROG Xbox Ally can play a handful of games that aren’t available via SteamOS for one reason or another. If you want to play Fortnite, Destiny, Battlefield, or Diablo III portably, the ROG Xbox Ally is a decent solution. Ditto for web-based games (playable here via Edge), games available via niche platforms like itch.io, or even titles you might install directly to the Windows desktop without an outside platform’s launcher (remember those?). And even for games available on SteamOS, the ROG Xbox Ally can give you access to the free or cheap versions you obtained from sales or offers on other platforms (don’t sleep on Amazon’s Prime Gaming offers if you like free GOG codes).

The killer app for the ROG Xbox Ally, though, is Xbox Game Pass. If you subscribe to Microsoft’s popular gaming service, logging in to your account on the ROG Xbox Ally means seeing your “installable” library instantly fill up with hundreds of games spanning a huge swath of the recent history of PC gaming. That’s an especially nice feeling for PC gaming newcomers who haven’t spent years digging through regular Steam sales to build up a sizable backlog.

If you have Xbox Game Pass, your ROG Xbox Ally will have a ton of available games from day one. Credit: Kyle Orland / Asus

The recent price hike to $30 a month for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate definitely makes this a less compelling proposition. But ROG Xbox Ally users can probably get by with the $16.49/month “Xbox Game Pass for PC” plan, which offers over 500 installable games and access to new first-party Microsoft releases. As a way to dip your toe into the wide world of PC gaming, it’s hard to beat.

Even for players who aren’t interested in Xbox Game Pass, the ROG Xbox Ally X is a well-built piece of hardware with the power to run today’s games pretty well. All things considered, though, the poor user experience of the Xbox FSE makes it hard to recommend either ROG Xbox Ally over somewhat less powerful SteamOS devices like the Steam Deck or Legion Go S. That said, we hope Microsoft will continue refining the Xbox Full-screen Experience to make for a Windows gaming experience that lives up to its promise.

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.

ROG Xbox Ally X: The Ars Technica review Read More »

Hans Koenigsmann, who investigated all of SpaceX’s rocket failures, is going to space

blue origin, hans koengismann, new shepard, Space / Kelly Newman / October 13, 2025

Then she kind of asked me, “Do you think I could be an astronaut?” I mean, technically, you don’t need your legs, and so on and so forth. When I realized that she meant New Shepard, I said, ‘Well, let me talk to people I know.’ So I called Audrey Powers (a Blue Origin engineer), and she said she loved the project. In a very subtle and slippery slope, I thought about this and said, “Actually, I think I can do this, too.”

The logic, for me, is that it doesn’t keep me from flying orbital. I’ve thought about this for a long time now because obviously I’m a risk person, so all kinds of things go through my head, right? And then there’s SpaceX and Blue, and all kinds of things go through my head there, too. So I talked to a lot of people, and there was not a single person who said, “No, you shouldn’t do that.” Yeah? That doesn’t mean that it’s right. But I asked people I’m not friends with, too, and they all said, “Well, why not?” So that’s how we ended up on this mission together.

Ars: What were your primary concerns about flying yourself? Was it safety? Was it the fact that you worked for SpaceX for 20 years and you were going to fly on Blue Origin?

Hans Koenigsmann: All of the above. I don’t know what they did for safety. I know what SpaceX did for safety. So I talked to a few people who worked there. And it all came down to the point that they would all fly on New Shepard. But for me, the ultimate discriminator is if you would let your children fly on it. And later, when we met them, I asked a lot of technical questions on the safety side, and I feel like they answered the majority of them thoughtfully and correctly. So on the safety side, I felt better after a while.

Hans Koenigsmann, who investigated all of SpaceX’s rocket failures, is going to space Read More »

Apple ups the reward for finding major exploits to $2 million

Apple, bug bounty, Security, syndication / Kelly Newman / October 11, 2025

Since launching its bug bounty program nearly a decade ago, Apple has always touted notable maximum payouts—$200,000 in 2016 and $1 million in 2019. Now the company is upping the stakes again. At the Hexacon offensive security conference in Paris on Friday, Apple vice president of security engineering and architecture Ivan Krstić announced a new maximum payout of $2 million for a chain of software exploits that could be abused for spyware.

The move reflects how valuable exploitable vulnerabilities can be within Apple’s highly protected mobile environment—and the lengths the company will go to to keep such discoveries from falling into the wrong hands. In addition to individual payouts, the company’s bug bounty also includes a bonus structure, adding additional awards for exploits that can bypass its extra secure Lockdown Mode as well as those discovered while Apple software is still in its beta testing phase. Taken together, the maximum award for what would otherwise be a potentially catastrophic exploit chain will now be $5 million. The changes take effect next month.

“We are lining up to pay many millions of dollars here, and there’s a reason,” Krstić tells WIRED. “We want to make sure that for the hardest categories, the hardest problems, the things that most closely mirror the kinds of attacks that we see with mercenary spyware—that the researchers who have those skills and abilities and put in that effort and time can get a tremendous reward.”

Apple says that there are more than 2.35 billion of its devices active around the world. The company’s bug bounty was originally an invite-only program for prominent researchers, but since opening to the public in 2020, Apple says that it has awarded more than $35 million to more than 800 security researchers. Top-dollar payouts are very rare, but Krstić says that the company has made multiple $500,000 payouts in recent years.

Apple ups the reward for finding major exploits to $2 million Read More »

Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas

boring company, elon musk, Policy, syndication, Tesla / Kelly Newman / October 10, 2025

Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills, and burns. The Boring Co. has contested the violations. Just last month, a construction worker suffered a “crush injury” after being pinned between two 4,000-foot pipes, according to police records. Firefighters used a crane to extract him from the tunnel opening.

After ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas published their January story, both the CEO and the chairman of the LVCVA board criticized the reporting, arguing the project is well-regulated. As an example, LVCVA CEO Steve Hill cited the delayed opening of a Loop station by local officials who were concerned that fire safety requirements weren’t adequate. Board chair Jim Gibson, who is also a Clark County commissioner, agreed the project is appropriately regulated.

“We wouldn’t have given approvals if we determined things weren’t the way they ought to be and what it needs to be for public safety reasons,” Gibson said, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal. “Our sense is we’ve done what we need to do to protect the public.”

Asked for a response to the new proposed fines, an LVCVA spokesperson said, “We won’t be participating in this story.”

The repeated allegations that the company is violating regulations—including the bespoke regulatory arrangement agreed to by the company—indicates that officials aren’t keeping the public safe, said Ben Leffel, an assistant public policy professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“Not if they’re recommitting almost the exact violation,” Leffel said.

Leffel questioned whether a $250,000 penalty would be significant enough to change operations at The Boring Co., which was valued at $7 billion in 2023. Studies show that fines that don’t put a significant dent in a company’s profit don’t deter companies from future violations, Leffel said.

A state spokesperson disagreed that regulators aren’t keeping the public safe and said the agency believes its penalties will deter “future non-compliance.”

“NDEP is actively monitoring and inspecting the projects,” the spokesperson said.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas Read More »

It’s back! The 2027 Chevy Bolt gets an all-new LFP battery, but what else?

Cars, Chevrolet Bolt / Kelly Newman / October 10, 2025

The Chevrolet Bolt was one of the earliest electric vehicles to offer well over 200 miles (321 km) of range at a competitive price. For Ars, it was love at first drive, and that remained true from model year 2017 through MY2023. On the right tires, it could show a VW Golf GTI a thing or two, and while it might have been slow-charging, it could still be a decent road-tripper.

All of this helped the Bolt become General Motors’ best-selling EV, at least until its used-to-be-called Ultium platform got up and running. And that’s despite a costly recall that required replacing batteries in tens of thousands of Bolts because of some badly folded cells. But GM had other plans for the Bolt’s factory, and in 2023, it announced its impending death.

The reaction from EV enthusiasts, and Bolt owners in particular, was so overwhelmingly negative that just a few months later, GM CEO Mary Barra backtracked, promising to bring the Bolt back, this time with a don’t-call-it-Ultium-anymore battery.

All the other specifics have been scarce until now.

When the Bolt goes back on sale later next year for MY2027, it will have some bold new colors and a new trim level, but it will look substantially the same as before. The new stuff is under the skin, like a 65 kWh battery pack that uses lithium iron phosphate prismatic cells instead of the nickel cobalt aluminum cells of old.

The new pack charges more quickly—it will accept up to 150 kW through its NACS port, and 10–80 percent should take 26 minutes, Chevy says. It’s even capable of bidirectional charging, including vehicle-to-home, with the right wallbox. Range should be 255 miles (410 km), a few miles less than the MY2023 version.

It’s back! The 2027 Chevy Bolt gets an all-new LFP battery, but what else? Read More »

Author name: Kelly Newman