Mike M.

Switching water sources improved hygiene of Pompeii’s public baths

Archaeology, hydraulics, Pompeii, Science / Mike M. / January 12, 2026

From well to aqueduct

The specific sites studied included the Stabian baths and related structures, which were built after 130 BCE and remained active until the aforementioned eruption; the Republican baths, built around the same period but abandoned around 30 BCE; the Forum baths, built after 80 BCE; and the aqueduct and its 14 water towers, constructed during the Augustan period.

There were variations in the chemical composition of the deposits, indicating the replacement of boilers for heating water and a renewal of water pipes in the infrastructure of Pompeii, particularly during the time period when modifications were being made to the Republican baths. The results for the Republican baths’ heated pools, for instance, showed clear contamination from human activity, specifically human waste (sweat, sebum, urine, or bathing oil), which suggests the water wasn’t changed regularly.

That is consistent with the limitations of supplying water at the time; the water-lifting machines could really only refresh the water about once a day. After the well shaft was enlarged, the carbonate deposits were much thinner, evidence of technological improvements that reduced sloshing as the water was raised. Once the aqueduct had been built, the bathing facilities were expanded with a likely corresponding improvement in hygiene.

On the whole, the aqueduct was a net good for Pompeii. “The changes in the water supply system of Pompeii revealed by carbonate deposits show an evolution from well-based to aqueduct-based supply with an increase in available water volume and in the scale of the bathing facilities, and likely an increase in hygiene,” the authors concluded. Granted, there was evidence of lead contamination in the water, particularly that supplied by the aqueduct, but carbonate deposits in the lead pipes seem to have reduced those levels over time.

The results may also help resolve a scientific debate about the origins of the aqueduct water: Was it water from the town of Avella that connected to the Aqua Augusta aqueduct or from the wells of Pompeii/springs of Vesuvius? Per the authors, the stable isotope composition of carbonate in the aqueduct is inconsistent with carbonate from volcanic rock sources, thus supporting the Avella source hypothesis.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2517276122 (About DOIs).

Switching water sources improved hygiene of Pompeii’s public baths Read More »

NASA launches new mission to get the most out of the James Webb Space Telescope

astrophysics, exoplanets, goddard space flight center, launch, NASA, pandora, Science, Space, spacex / Mike M. / January 12, 2026

“It was not recognized how serious a problem that is until… about 2017 or 2018.”

The Pandora observatory, seen here inside a clean room, is about the size of a refrigerator. Credit: Blue Canyon Technologies

Among other things, the James Webb Space Telescope is designed to get us closer to finding habitable worlds around faraway stars. From its perch a million miles from Earth, Webb’s huge gold-coated mirror collects more light than any other telescope put into space.

The Webb telescope, launched in 2021 at a cost of more than $10 billion, has the sensitivity to peer into distant planetary systems and detect the telltale chemical fingerprints of molecules critical to or indicative of potential life, like water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane. Webb can do this while also observing the oldest observable galaxies in the Universe and studying planets, moons, and smaller objects within our own Solar System.

Naturally, astronomers want to get the most out of their big-budget observatory. That’s where NASA’s Pandora mission comes in.

The Pandora satellite rocketed into orbit early Sunday from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. It hitched a ride with around 40 other small payloads aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, launching into a polar Sun-synchronous orbit before deploying at an altitude of roughly 380 miles (613 kilometers).

Over the next few weeks, ground controllers will put Pandora through a series of commissioning and calibration steps before turning its eyes toward deep space. Pandora is a fraction of the size of Webb. Its primary mirror is about the size of the largest consumer-grade amateur telescopes, less than one-tenth the dimension of Webb’s. NASA capped Pandora’s budget at $20 million. The budget to develop Webb was more than 500 times higher.

Double-checking Webb

So what can little Pandora add to Webb’s bleeding-edge science? First, it helps to understand how scientists use Webb to study exoplanets. When a planet passes in front of its parent star, some of the starlight shines through its atmosphere. Webb has the sensitivity to detect the filtered starlight and break it apart into its spectral components, telling astronomers about the composition of clouds and hazes in the planet’s atmosphere. Ultimately, the data is useful in determining whether an exoplanet might be like Earth.

“I liken it often to holding a glass of wine in front of a candle, so that we can see really what’s inside,” said Daniel Apai, a member of Pandora’s science team from the University of Arizona. “We can assess, basically, the quality of the wine. In this case, we use the light that filters through the star’s [atmosphere] through the planetary atmosphere to judge what chemicals, gases in particular, may be present. Water vapor is one that we are the most sensitive to.”

But there’s a catch. Stars shine millions to billions of times brighter than their planetary companions, and starlight isn’t constant. Like the Sun, other stars have spots, flares, and variability over hours, days, or years. Hot spots and cool spots rotate in and out of view. And the star’s own atmospheres can contain some of the same molecules scientists are seeking to find on exoplanets, including water vapor.

Therefore, a star’s spectral signature easily outshines the signal coming from a nearby planet. Astronomers discovered this signal “contamination” when they started looking for potentially habitable worlds, injecting confounding uncertainties into their findings. Were the promising spectra they were seeing coming from the planet or the star?

Artist’s concept of the Pandora telescope with an exoplanet and two stars in the background. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab

“One of the ways that this manifests is by making you think that you’re seeing absorption features like water and potentially methane when there may not be any, or, conversely, you’re not seeing the signatures that are there because they’re masked by the stellar signal,” said Tom Barclay, deputy project scientist and technical lead on the Pandora mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The problem became apparent in the 2010s as astronomers used more powerful telescopes to see the finer details of exoplanets.

“This is something that we always suspected as a community,” Apai told Ars. “We always suspected that stars are not perfect. At some point, it becomes a problem. But it was not recognized how serious a problem that is until, I would say, about 2017 or 2018.”

Scientists quickly got to work looking for a solution, and NASA selected the Pandora mission for development in 2021, just months before the launch of Webb.

“When we’re trying to find water in the atmospheres of these small Earth-like planets, we want to be really sure it’s not coming from the star before we go tell the press and make a big stink about it,” said Elisa Quintana, Pandora’s lead scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “So we designed the Pandora mission specifically to solve this problem.”

From low-Earth orbit, Pandora will observe exoplanets and their stars simultaneously, allowing astronomers to correct their measurements of the planet’s atmospheric composition and structure based on the ever-changing conditions of the host star itself. Webb could theoretically do this work, but scientists already fill every hour of Webb’s schedule. Pandora will point and stare at 20 preselected exoplanets 10 times during its one-year prime mission, collecting 24 hours of visible and infrared observations with each visit. This will capture short-term and longer-term changes in each star’s behavior.

SpaceX launched Pandora into a so-called “twilight orbit” that follows the boundary between day and night on Earth, allowing the satellite to keep its solar panels illuminated by the Sun while performing its observations.

“We can send this small telescope out, sit on a star for a really long time, and sort of map all the star spots, and really disentangle the star and planet signals,” Quintana said in a recent panel discussion at NASA Goddard. “It’s filling a really nice gap in helping us to sort of calibrate all these stars that James Webb is going to look at, so we can be really confident that all of these molecules that we’re detecting in planets are real.”

“I think this is really the most important scientific barrier that we have to break down to fully unlock the potential of Webb and future missions,” Apai said.

Looking down the barrel of Pandora’s 17-inch-wide (45-centimeter) telescope. Credit: NASA/Jordan Karburn, LLNL

Ben Hord, a member of Pandora’s science team at Goddard, singled out one example in a presentation at an American Astronomical Society meeting last year. This planet, named GJ 486 b, is a “super-Earth” discovered in 2021 circling a relatively cool red dwarf star. Hord said astronomers had trouble determining if the planet has a water-rich atmosphere based on Webb’s observations alone.

“We want to know if water is in the atmospheres of these exoplanets, and this stellar contamination from the spots on the star can mask or mimic features like water,” Hord said. “Our hope is that Pandora will help James Webb data be even more precise by providing context and understanding for these host stars and these planetary systems.”

Planets around small dwarf stars are some of the best candidates for finding a true Earth analog. Because these stars put out a fraction of the heat of the Sun, a potentially habitable planet could lurk very close to its host, completing a year in a handful of days. This allows astronomers to see the planet repeatedly as it passes in front of its star, rapidly building a dataset on its size, structure, and environment.

Scientists hope they can extend the lessons learned from Pandora’s observations of a sample of 20 exoplanets to other worlds in our galactic neighborhood. As of late last year, astronomers have confirmed detections of more than 6,000 exoplanets.

“With a well-corrected spectrum, we can say there’s water, there’s nitrogen,” Quintana said. “So with every mission, as we evolve, we’re chipping away and taking bigger and bigger steps toward that question of, ‘OK, we know Earths are out there. We know they’re abundant. We know they have atmospheres. How do we know if they have life on them?’”

Building on a budget

A mission like Pandora was not possible until recently, certainly not on the $20 million budget NASA devoted to the project. With Pandora, the agency took advantage of a fast-growing small satellite industry churning out spacecraft at a fraction of what it cost 10 or 15 years ago.

The Pandora spacecraft weighed approximately 716 pounds (325 kilograms) at launch and likely would have required a dedicated rocket to travel to space before SpaceX started offering shared rides on its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. NASA did not disclose what it paid SpaceX to launch Pandora, but publicly available pricing suggests SpaceX charges a few million dollars to launch a satellite of the same size. Before the rideshare option became available, NASA would have paid tens of millions of dollars for the launch alone.

The Pandora mission is part of NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers program, an initiative set up to solicit ideas for lower-cost astronomy missions.

“It’s been very, very challenging to try and squeeze this big amount of science into this small cost box, but that’s kind of what makes it fun, right?” Barclay told Ars. “We have to be pretty ruthless in making sure that we only fund the things we need to fund. We accept risk where we need to accept the risk, and at times we need to accept that we may need to give up performance in order to make sure that we hit the schedule and we hit the launch [schedule].”

It helps that Pandora’s 17-inch (45-centimeter) telescope comes from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which had the technology on the shelf from a national security program. Pandora uses a small satellite platform from Blue Canyon Technologies, a Colorado company.

“There is no way we could have done Pandora 10 years ago,” Barclay said. “The small launch capabilities that come from companies like Rocket Lab and SpaceX and others meant that now the vendors of spacecraft buses and spacecraft instruments are able to push their costs down because they know that there’s a market for small missions out there. Other parts of the government are investing heavily in small spacecraft, and so that allows us on the science side to make use of that economies of scale.”

For comparison, the European Space Agency launched an exoplanet observatory about the same size as Pandora in 2019 at a cost of more than $100 million.

There are companies now looking at how to scale up production of larger satellites, too. Cheaper, heavy satellites could launch on new heavy- and super-heavy rockets like SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s New Glenn.

“I think it is an amazing capability to have for astrophysicists because science is moving fast,” Apai said. “Exoplanet science is changing. I would say every three or four years, we have breakthroughs. And the product keeps changing. We push the boundaries, and if you ever have to work with 20- or 25-year-long mission lifetimes, that really just limits progress.”

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

NASA launches new mission to get the most out of the James Webb Space Telescope Read More »

These 60,000-year-old poison arrows are oldest yet found

anthropology, Archeology, poison arrows, Science / Mike M. / January 9, 2026

Poisoned arrows or darts have long been used by cultures all over the world for hunting or warfare. For example, there are recipes for poisoning projective weapons, and deploying them in battle, in Greek and Roman historical documents, as well as references in Greek mythology and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Chinese warriors over the ages did the same, as did the Gauls and Scythians, and some Native American populations.

Archaeologists have now found traces of a plant-based poison on several 60,000-year-old quartz Stone Age arrowheads found in South Africa, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. That would make this the oldest direct evidence of using poisons on projectiles—a cognitively complex hunting strategy—and pushes the timeline for using poison arrows back into the Pleistocene.

The poisons commonly used could be derived from plants or animals (frogs, beetles, venomous lizards). Plant-based examples include curare, a muscle relaxant that paralyzes the victim’s respiratory system, causing death by asphyxiation. Oleander, milkweeds, or inee (onaye) contain cardiac glucosides. In Southeast Asia, the sap or juice of seeds from the ancar tree is smeared on arrowheads, which causes paralysis, convulsions, and cardiac arrest due to the presence of toxins like strychnine. Several species of aconite are known for their use as arrow poisons in Siberia and northern Japan.

According to the authors, up until now, the earliest direct evidence of poisoned arrows dates back to the mid-Holocene. For instance, scientists found traces of toxic glycoside residues on 4,000-year-old bone-tipped arrows recovered from an Egyptian tomb, as well as on bone arrow points from 6,700 years ago excavated from South Africa’s Kruger Cave. The only prior evidence of using poisons for hunting during the Pleistocene is a “poison applicator” found at Border Cave in South Africa, along with a lump of beeswax.

Milk of the poisonous onion

The authors sampled 10 quartz-backed arrowheads recovered from the Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter site in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The results revealed that five of the 10 tested tips had traces of compounds found in Boophone disticha, aka gifbol (poisonous onion), sometimes called the century plant, which is common throughout South Africa. Various parts of the plant have been used as an analgesic (specifically a volatile oil called eugenol) as well as for poisonous hunting purposes. Its more toxic compounds include buphandrine, crinamidine, and buphanine; the latter is similar in effect to scopolamine and can cause hallucinations, coma, or death.

These 60,000-year-old poison arrows are oldest yet found Read More »

These dogs eavesdrop on their owners to learn new words

animal behavior, animal cognition, animals, dog language, Dogs, Science / Mike M. / January 8, 2026

Next, the entire experiment was repeated with one key variation: This time, during the training protocol, rather than addressing the dogs directly when naming new toys, the dogs merely watched while their owners talked to another person while naming the toys, never directly addressing the dogs at all.

The result: 80 percent of the dogs correctly chose the toys in the direct address condition, and 100 percent did so in the overhearing condition. Taken together, the results demonstrate that GWL dogs can learn new object labels just by overhearing interactions, regardless of whether the dogs are active participants in the interactions or passive listeners—much like what has been observed in young children around a year-and-a-half old.

To learn whether temporal continuity (a nonsocial factor) or the lack thereof affects label learning in GWL dogs, the authors also devised a third experimental variation. The owner would show the dog a new toy, place it in a bucket, let the dog take the toy out of the bucket, and then place the toy back in. Then the owner would lift the bucket to prevent the dog from seeing what was inside and repeatedly use the toy name in a sentence while looking back and forth from the dog to the bucket. This was followed by the usual testing phase. The authors concluded that the dogs didn’t need temporal continuity to form object-label mappings. And when the same dogs were re-tested two weeks later, those mappings had not decayed; the dogs remembered.

But GWL dogs are extremely rare, and the findings don’t extend to typical dogs, as the group discovered when they ran both versions of the experiment using 10 non-GWL border collies. There was no evidence of actual learning in these typical dogs; the authors suggest their behavior reflects a doggy preference for novelty when it comes to toy selection, not the ability to learn object-label mappings.

“Our findings show that the socio-cognitive processes enabling word learning from overheard speech are not uniquely human,” said co-author Shany Dror of ELTE and VetMedUni universities. “Under the right conditions, some dogs present behaviors strikingly similar to those of young children. These dogs provide an exceptional model for exploring some of the cognitive abilities that enabled humans to develop language. But we do not suggest that all dogs learn in this way—far from it.”

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adq5474 (About DOIs).

These dogs eavesdrop on their owners to learn new words Read More »

Grok assumes users seeking images of underage girls have “good intent”

AI, ai csam, AI safety, chatbot, child safety, child sexual abuse materials, elon musk, grok, Policy, Twitter, X, xAI / Mike M. / January 8, 2026

Conflicting instructions?

Expert explains how simple it could be to tweak Grok to block CSAM outputs.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

For weeks, xAI has faced backlash over undressing and sexualizing images of women and children generated by Grok. One researcher conducted a 24-hour analysis of the Grok account on X and estimated that the chatbot generated over 6,000 images an hour flagged as “sexually suggestive or nudifying,” Bloomberg reported.

While the chatbot claimed that xAI supposedly “identified lapses in safeguards” that allowed outputs flagged as child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and was “urgently fixing them,” Grok has proven to be an unreliable spokesperson, and xAI has not announced any fixes.

A quick look at Grok’s safety guidelines on its public GitHub shows they were last updated two months ago. The GitHub also indicates that, despite prohibiting such content, Grok maintains programming that could make it likely to generate CSAM.

Billed as “the highest priority,” superseding “any other instructions” Grok may receive, these rules explicitly prohibit Grok from assisting with queries that “clearly intend to engage” in creating or distributing CSAM or otherwise sexually exploit children.

However, the rules also direct Grok to “assume good intent” and “don’t make worst-case assumptions without evidence” when users request images of young women.

Using words like “‘teenage’ or ‘girl’ does not necessarily imply underage,” Grok’s instructions say.

X declined Ars’ request to comment. The only statement X Safety has made so far shows that Elon Musk’s social media platform plans to blame users for generating CSAM, threatening to permanently suspend users and report them to law enforcement.

Critics dispute that X’s solution will end the Grok scandal, and child safety advocates and foreign governments are growing increasingly alarmed as X delays updates that could block Grok’s undressing spree.

Why Grok shouldn’t “assume good intentions”

Grok can struggle to assess users’ intenttions, making it “incredibly easy” for the chatbot to generate CSAM under xAI’s policy, Alex Georges, an AI safety researcher, told Ars.

The chatbot has been instructed, for example, that “there are no restrictionson fictional adult sexual content with dark or violent themes,” and Grok’s mandate to assume “good intent” may create gray areas in which CSAM could be created.

There’s evidence that in relying on these guidelines, Grok is currently generating a flood of harmful images on X, with even more graphic images being created on the chatbot’s standalone website and app, Wired reported. Researchers who surveyed 20,000 random images and 50,000 prompts told CNN that more than half of Grok’s outputs that feature images of people sexualize women, with 2 percent depicting “people appearing to be 18 years old or younger.” Some users specifically “requested minors be put in erotic positions and that sexual fluids be depicted on their bodies,” researchers found.

Grok isn’t the only chatbot that sexualizes images of real people without consent, but its policy seems to leave safety at a surface level, Georges said, and xAI is seemingly unwilling to expand safety efforts to block more harmful outputs.

Georges is the founder and CEO of AetherLab, an AI company that helps a wide range of firms—including tech giants like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Amazon—deploy generative AI products with appropriate safeguards. He told Ars that AetherLab works with many AI companies that are concerned about blocking harmful companion bot outputs like Grok’s. And although there are no industry norms—creating a “Wild West” due to regulatory gaps, particularly in the US—his experience with chatbot content moderation has convinced him that Grok’s instructions to “assume good intent” are “silly” because xAI’s requirement of “clear intent” doesn’t mean anything operationally to the chatbot.

“I can very easily get harmful outputs by just obfuscating my intent,” Georges said, emphasizing that “users absolutely do not automatically fit into the good-intent bucket.” And even “in a perfect world,” where “every single user does have good intent,” Georges noted, the model “will still generate bad content on its own because of how it’s trained.”

Benign inputs can lead to harmful outputs, Georges explained, and a sound safety system would catch both benign and harmful prompts. Consider, he suggested, a prompt for “a pic of a girl model taking swimming lessons.”

The user could be trying to create an ad for a swimming school, or they could have malicious intent and be attempting to manipulate the model. For users with benign intent, prompting can “go wrong,” Georges said, if Grok’s training data statistically links certain “normal phrases and situations” to “younger-looking subjects and/or more revealing depictions.”

“Grok might have seen a bunch of images where ‘girls taking swimming lessons’ were young and that human ‘models’ were dressed in revealing things, which means it could produce an underage girl in a swimming pool wearing something revealing,” Georges said. “So, a prompt that looks ‘normal’ can still produce an image that crosses the line.”

While AetherLab has never worked directly with xAI or X, Georges’ team has “tested their systems independently by probing for harmful outputs, and unsurprisingly, we’ve been able to get really bad content out of them,” Georges said.

Leaving AI chatbots unchecked poses a risk to children. A spokesperson for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which processes reports of CSAM on X in the US, told Ars that “sexual images of children, including those created using artificial intelligence, are child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Whether an image is real or computer-generated, the harm is real, and the material is illegal.”

Researchers at the Internet Watch Foundation told the BBC that users of dark web forums are already promoting CSAM they claim was generated by Grok. These images are typically classified in the United Kingdom as the “lowest severity of criminal material,” researchers said. But at least one user was found to have fed a less-severe Grok output into another tool to generate the “most serious” criminal material, demonstrating how Grok could be used as an instrument by those seeking to commercialize AI CSAM.

Easy tweaks to make Grok safer

In August, xAI explained how the company works to keep Grok safe for users. But although the company acknowledged that it’s difficult to distinguish “malignant intent” from “mere curiosity,” xAI seemed convinced that Grok could “decline queries demonstrating clear intent to engage in activities” like child sexual exploitation, without blocking prompts from merely curious users.

That report showed that xAI refines Grok over time to block requests for CSAM “by adding safeguards to refuse requests that may lead to foreseeable harm”—a step xAI does not appear to have taken since late December, when reports first raised concerns that Grok was sexualizing images of minors.

Georges said there are easy tweaks xAI could make to Grok to block harmful outputs, including CSAM, while acknowledging that he is making assumptions without knowing exactly how xAI works to place checks on Grok.

First, he recommended that Grok rely on end-to-end guardrails, blocking “obvious” malicious prompts and flagging suspicious ones. It should then double-check outputs to block harmful ones, even when prompts are benign.

This strategy works best, Georges said, when multiple watchdog systems are employed, noting that “you can’t rely on the generator to self-police because its learned biases are part of what creates these failure modes.” That’s the role that AetherLab wants to fill across the industry, helping test chatbots for weakness to block harmful outputs by using “an ‘agentic’ approach with a shitload of AI models working together (thereby reducing the collective bias),” Georges said.

xAI could also likely block more harmful outputs by reworking Grok’s prompt style guidance, Georges suggested. “If Grok is, say, 30 percent vulnerable to CSAM-style attacks and another provider is 1 percent vulnerable, that’s a massive difference,” Georges said.

It appears that xAI is currently relying on Grok to police itself, while using safety guidelines that Georges said overlook an “enormous” number of potential cases where Grok could generate harmful content. The guidelines do not “signal that safety is a real concern,” Georges said, suggesting that “if I wanted to look safe while still allowing a lot under the hood, this is close to the policy I’d write.”

Chatbot makers must protect kids, NCMEC says

X has been very vocal about policing its platform for CSAM since Musk took over Twitter, but under former CEO Linda Yaccarino, the company adopted a broad protective stance against all image-based sexual abuse (IBSA). In 2024, X became one of the earliest corporations to voluntarily adopt the IBSA Principles that X now seems to be violating by failing to tweak Grok.

Those principles seek to combat all kinds of IBSA, recognizing that even fake images can “cause devastating psychological, financial, and reputational harm.” When it adopted the principles, X vowed to prevent the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images by providing easy-to-use reporting tools and quickly supporting the needs of victims desperate to block “the nonconsensual creation or distribution of intimate images” on its platform.

Kate Ruane, the director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project, which helped form the working group behind the IBSA Principles, told Ars that although the commitments X made were “voluntary,” they signaled that X agreed the problem was a “pressing issue the company should take seriously.”

“They are on record saying that they will do these things, and they are not,” Ruane said.

As the Grok controversy sparks probes in Europe, India, and Malaysia, xAI may be forced to update Grok’s safety guidelines or make other tweaks to block the worst outputs.

In the US, xAI may face civil suits under federal or state laws that restrict intimate image abuse. If Grok’s harmful outputs continue into May, X could face penalties under the Take It Down Act, which authorizes the Federal Trade Commission to intervene if platforms don’t quickly remove both real and AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery.

But whether US authorities will intervene any time soon remains unknown, as Musk is a close ally of the Trump administration. A spokesperson for the Justice Department told CNN that the department “takes AI-generated child sex abuse material extremely seriously and will aggressively prosecute any producer or possessor of CSAM.”

“Laws are only as good as their enforcement,” Ruane told Ars. “You need law enforcement at the Federal Trade Commission or at the Department of Justice to be willing to go after these companies if they are in violation of the laws.”

Child safety advocates seem alarmed by the sluggish response. “Technology companies have a responsibility to prevent their tools from being used to sexualize or exploit children,” NCMEC’s spokesperson told Ars. “As AI continues to advance, protecting children must remain a clear and nonnegotiable priority.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Grok assumes users seeking images of underage girls have “good intent” Read More »

Warner Bros. sticks with Netflix merger, calls Paramount’s $108B bid “illusory”

netflix, paramount, Policy, warner bros. discovery / Mike M. / January 7, 2026

Larry Ellison pledged $40B, but “he didn’t raise the price,” Warner chair says.

Credit: Getty Images | Kenneth Cheung

The Warner Bros. Discovery board has unanimously voted to rebuff Paramount’s $108.4 billion offer and urged shareholders to reject the hostile takeover bid. The board is continuing to support Netflix’s pending $82.7 billion purchase of its streaming and movie studios businesses along with a separate spinoff of the Warner Bros. cable TV division.

Warner Bros. called the Paramount bid “illusory” in a presentation for shareholders today, saying the offer requires an “extraordinary amount of debt financing” and other terms that make it less likely to be completed than a Netflix merger. It would be the largest leveraged buyout ever, “with $87B of total pro forma gross debt,” and is “effectively a one-sided option for PSKY [Paramount Skydance] as the offer can be terminated or amended by PSKY at any time,” Warner Bros. said.

The Warner Bros. presentation touted Netflix’s financial strength while saying that Paramount “is a $14B market cap company with a ‘junk’ credit rating, negative free cash flows, significant fixed financial obligations, and a high degree of dependency on its linear business.” The Paramount “offer is illusory as it cannot be completed before it is currently scheduled to expire,” Warner Bros. said.

Warner Bros. said in a letter to shareholders today that it prefers Netflix with its “market capitalization of approximately $400 billion, an investment grade balance sheet, an A/A3 credit rating and estimated free cash flow of more than $12 billion for 2026.” Moreover, the deal with Netflix provides Warner Bros. with “more flexibility to operate in a normal course until closing,” the letter said.

Even if Paramount is able to complete a deal, “WBD stockholders will not receive cash for 12-18 months and you cannot trade your shares while shares are tendered,” the board told investors. Despite the seemingly firm position, Warner Bros. Discovery board Chairman Samuel Di Piazza Jr. seemed to suggest in an appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box today that the board could be swayed by a higher offer.

Larry Ellison “didn’t raise the price”

On December 5, after a bidding war that also involved Paramount and Comcast, Warner Bros. struck a deal to sell Netflix its streaming and movie studios businesses. Netflix, already the world’s largest streaming service, would become an even bigger juggernaut if it completes the takeover including rival HBO Max, WB Studios, and other assets.

While the Paramount bid is higher, it would involve the purchase of more Warner Bros. assets than the deal with Netflix. “Unlike Netflix, Paramount is seeking to buy the company’s legacy television and cable assets such as CNN, TNT, and Discovery Channel,” the Financial Times wrote. “Netflix plans to acquire WBD after it spins off its cable TV business, which is scheduled to happen this year.”

Paramount, which recently completed an $8 billion merger with Skydance, submitted its bid for a hostile takeover days after the Netflix/Warner Bros. deal was announced. Warner Bros. resisted, and Paramount amended its offer on December 22 to address objections.

“Larry Ellison has agreed to provide an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4 billion of the equity financing for the offer and any damages claims against Paramount,” Paramount said. It also said it offered “improved flexibility to WBD on debt refinancing transactions, representations and interim operating covenants.”

Larry Ellison’s son, David Ellison, is the chairman and CEO of Paramount Skydance. In his CNBC appearance, Di Piazza acknowledged that “Larry Ellison stepped up to the table and the board recognizes what he did.” But “ultimately, he didn’t raise the price. So, in our perspective, Netflix continues to be the superior offer, a clear path to closing.”

Warner Bros. shareholders currently have a January 21 deadline for tendering shares under the Paramount offer, but that could change, as Paramount has indicated it could sweeten the deal further.

Breakup fees a sticking point

Warner Bros. said in the letter to shareholders today that the latest offer still isn’t good enough. Paramount is “attempting an acquisition requiring $94.65 billion of debt and equity financing, nearly seven times its total market capitalization,” requiring it “to incur an extraordinary amount of incremental debt—more than $50 billion—through arrangements with multiple financing partners,” the letter said.

Warner Bros. said that breaking the deal with Netflix would require it to pay Netflix a $2.8 billion termination fee. Either Paramount or Netflix would have to pay Warner Bros. a $5.8 billion termination fee if the buyer can’t get regulatory approval for a merger. But if a Paramount deal failed, there would also be $4.7 billion in unreimbursed costs for shareholders, reducing the effective termination fee to $1.1 billion, according to Warner Bros.

“In the large majority of cases, when an overbidder comes in, they take that break[up] fee and pay it,” Di Piazza said on CNBC.

Warner Bros. Discovery also said the Paramount offer would prohibit it from completing its planned separation of Discovery Global and Warner Bros., which it argues will bring substantial benefits to shareholders by letting each of the separated entities “focus on its own strategic plan.” This separation can be completed even if Netflix is unable to complete the merger for regulatory reasons, it said.

We contacted Paramount and will update this article if it provides any response.

Warner Bros. investor wants more negotiations

Warner Bros. is facing pressure from one of its top shareholders to negotiate further with Paramount. “Pentwater Capital Management, a hedge-fund manager that is among Warner’s top shareholders, told the board in a letter Wednesday that it is failing in its fiduciary duty to shareholders by not engaging in discussions with Paramount,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

The hedge-fund manager said the board should at least ask Paramount what improvements it is willing to make to its offer. “Pentwater vowed to vote against the merger and not support the renomination of directors in the future if Paramount raises its offer and Warner’s board doesn’t have further discussions with the company,” the Journal wrote.

The Warner Bros. board argued in its letter that “PSKY has continued to submit offers that still include many of the deficiencies we previously repeatedly identified to PSKY, none of which are present in the Netflix merger agreement, all while asserting that its offers do not represent its ‘best and final’ proposal.”

However, Di Piazza suggested on CNBC that Paramount could still put a superior offer on the table. “They had that opportunity in the seventh proposal, the eighth proposal, and they haven’t done it,” he said. “And so from our perspective, they’ve got to put something on the table that is compelling and is superior.”

Netflix issued a statement today saying it “is engaging with competition authorities, including the US Department of Justice and European Commission,” to move the deal forward. “As previously disclosed, the transaction is expected to close in 12-18 months from the date that Netflix and WBD originally entered into their merger agreement,” Netflix said.

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.

Warner Bros. sticks with Netflix merger, calls Paramount’s $108B bid “illusory” Read More »

Bose open-sources its SoundTouch home theater smart speakers ahead of end-of-life

audio, bose, Smart Home, Speakers, Tech / Mike M. / January 7, 2026

Bose released the Application Programming Interface (API) documentation for its SoundTouch speakers today, putting a silver lining around the impending end-of-life (EoL) of the expensive home theater devices.

In October, Bose announced that its SoundTouch Wi-Fi speakers and soundbars would become dumb speakers on February 18. At the time, Bose said that the speakers would only work if a device was connected via AUX, HDMI, or Bluetooth (which has higher latency than Wi-Fi).

After that date, the speakers would stop receiving security and software updates and lose cloud connectivity and their companion app, the Framingham, Massachusetts-based company said. Without the app, users would no longer be able to integrate the device with music services, such as Spotify, have multiple SoundTouch devices play the same audio simultaneously, or use or edit saved presets.

The announcement frustrated some of Bose’s long-time customers, some of whom own multiple SoundTouch devices that still function properly. Many questioned companies’ increasingly common practice of bricking expensive products to focus on new devices or to minimize costs, or because they’ve gone through acquisitions or bankruptcy. SoundTouch speakers released in 2013 and 2015 with prices ranging from $399 to $1,500.

Today, Bose had better news. In an email to customers, Bose announced that AirPlay and Spotify Connect will still work with SoundTouch speakers after EoL, expanding the wireless capabilities that people will still be able to access.

Additionally, SoundTouch devices that support AirPlay 2 can play the same audio simultaneously.

The SoundTouch app will also live on, albeit stripped of some functionality.

“On May 6, 2026, the app will update to a version that supports the functions that can operate locally without the cloud. No action will be required on your part. Opening the app will apply the update automatically,” Bose said.

Bose open-sources its SoundTouch home theater smart speakers ahead of end-of-life Read More »

Japanese nuclear plant operator fabricated seismic risk data

earthquakes, falsification, fraud, Fukushima, Japan, nuclear power, nuclear safety, Science, seismic risk / Mike M. / January 7, 2026

On Wednesday, Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority announced that it is halting the relicensing process for two reactors at the Hamaoka plant after revelations that the operator fabricated seismic hazard data. Japan has been slowly reactivating its extensive nuclear power plant collection after it was shut down following the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. The latest scandal is especially shocking, given that the Hamaoka plant is located on the coast near an active subduction fault—just as Fukushima Daiichi is.

The Nuclear Regulation Authority was reportedly alerted by a whistleblower in February of last year, but the issue became public this week when the regulators halted an evaluation process that could have led to a reactor restart at Hamaoka. This prompted the company that operates the plants, the Chubu Electric Power Co., to issue a press release describing in detail how the company manipulated the seismic safety data.

Based on an English translation, it appears that seismic risks were evaluated at least in part by scaling up the ground motion using data from smaller earthquakes. This is an inexact process, so the standard approach is to create a group of 20 different upscaled earthquake motions and find the one that best represents the average among the 20.

The company now acknowledges that since 2018, its staff has been generating large collections of upscaled earthquake scenarios, choosing one from among them, and then selecting another 19 so the average would make that event appear representative. The company does not mention how this process affected risk analysis, but it’s probably safe to assume that it was chosen specifically to make any risks seem more tolerable.

Japanese nuclear plant operator fabricated seismic risk data Read More »

HP’s EliteBoard G1a is a Ryzen-powered Windows 11 PC in a membrane keyboard

CES 2026, HP, Keyboards, Raspberry Pi, Tech / Mike M. / January 6, 2026

As a Windows system built inside of a functioning membrane keyboard, the HP EliteBoard G1a announced today is a more accessible alternative to other keyboard-PCs.

The Commodore 64 made the keyboard-PC famous in the 1980s, but the keyboard-PC space has been dominated by the Raspberry Pi. In 2019, the single-board computer (SBC) maker released the Raspberry Pi 400, which is essentially a Raspberry Pi 4 SBC inside a case that also functions as a keyboard for the system. USB, HDMI, and Ethernet ports, plus a GPIO header and native Raspberry Pi OS Linux distribution add up to a low-end desktop computer experience that only costs $100. Then the Raspberry Pi 500 with a Pi 5 powered by a quad-core, 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 inside, and the Pi 500+, which has NVMe SSD, instead of microSD, storage, and is built inside of a low-profile mechanical keyboard (it’s also twice as expensive at $200).

The Pi 500+ keyboard-PC using RGB. Credit: Raspberry Pi

But Raspberry Pis largely appeal to tinkerers, DIYers, and Linux fans, making Pi-as-a-desktop a niche product with a substantial learning curve for newcomers.

Alternatively, HP’s EliteBoard will bring Windows and a more powerful x86 architecture to the keyboard-PC form factor. HP says the EliteBoard will support Windows 11 Pro for Business and an AMD Ryzen AI 300-series processor with up to 50 TOPs NPU. The device will be sold with a 32 W internal battery and is part of Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC program.

HP’s EliteBoard G1a is a Ryzen-powered Windows 11 PC in a membrane keyboard Read More »

Letting prisons jam contraband phones is a bad idea, phone companies tell FCC

brendan carr, FCC, Policy, prison phone jamming / Mike M. / January 6, 2026

FCC hopes you like jammin’ too

“Jamming will block all communications,” including 911 calls, CTIA tells FCC.

Credit: Getty Images | da-kuk

A Federal Communications Commission proposal to let state and local prisons jam contraband cell phones has support from Republican attorneys general and prison phone companies but faces opposition from wireless carriers that say it would disrupt lawful communications. Groups dedicated to Wi-Fi and GPS also raised concerns in comments to the FCC.

“Jamming will block all communications, not just communications from contraband devices,” wireless lobby group CTIA said in December 29 comments in response to Chairman Brendan Carr’s proposal. The CTIA said that “jamming blocks all communications, including lawful communications such as 911 calling,” and argued that the FCC “has no authority to allow jamming.”

CTIA members AT&T and Verizon expressed their displeasure in separate comments to the FCC. “The proposed legal framework is based on a flawed factual premise,” AT&T wrote.

While the Communications Act prohibits interference with authorized radio communications, Carr’s plan tries to sidestep this prohibition by proposing to de-authorize certain communications, AT&T wrote. “This legal framework, however, is premised on a fundamental factual error: the assumption that jammers will only block ‘unauthorized’ communications without impacting lawful uses. There is no way to jam some communications on a spectrum band but not others,” AT&T wrote.

Previous FCC leaders recognized the problem that radio jammers can’t differentiate between contraband and legitimate devices, AT&T said. “As explained above, there are no technical workarounds to that limitation with respect to jammers,” AT&T wrote.

“Jammers block all wireless communications”

In 2013, the FCC explained that jamming systems transmit on the same frequencies as their targets in order to disrupt the links between devices and network base stations and that this process “render[s] any wireless device operating on those frequencies unusable. When used to disrupt wireless devices, radio signal jammers cannot differentiate between contraband devices and legitimate devices, including devices making 911 calls. Radio signal jammers block all wireless communications on affected spectrum bands.”

That apparently hasn’t changed. The FCC’s new proposal issued in September 2025 said the commission’s “understanding is that jamming solutions block calls on all affected frequencies and… are unable to allow 911 calls to be transmitted.” But the proposal indicates this may be an acceptable outcome, as “some state DOC [Department of Corrections] officials have indicated that correctional facilities typically do not allow any calls from within, including emergency calls.”

If the FCC adopts its plan, it would “authorize, for the first time, non-federal operation of radio frequency (RF) jamming solutions in correctional facilities,” the proposal said.

Carr said in September that previous FCC actions, such as authorizing “contraband interdiction systems” and letting wireless carriers disable contraband phones at a prison’s request, have not been enough. “Contraband cellphones have been pouring into state and local prisons by the tens of thousands every year,” Carr said. “They are used to run drug operations, orchestrate kidnappings, and further criminal enterprises in communities all across the country.”

Carr said that prisons and jails will not be required to install jamming systems and that the FCC “proposes to authorize targeted jamming. Jamming technology can be precise enough that it does not interrupt the regular communications of law enforcement or community members in the vicinity.” The FCC proposal asks the public for comment on “restrictions that might prove necessary to ensure that jamming solutions are limited to this targeted use, and to mitigate the risk that these solutions are deployed in contexts other than a correctional facility environment.”

Jamming has support from 23 state attorneys general, all Republicans, who told the FCC that “inmates routinely use smuggled phones to coordinate criminal enterprises, intimidate witnesses, and orchestrate violence both inside and outside prison walls.” More jamming support came from the state Department of Corrections in both Florida and South Carolina.

Prison phone companies like jamming

Prison phone companies that would financially benefit from increased use of official phone systems also support jamming cell phones. Global Tel*Link (aka ViaPath) called the plan “one more tool to help combat the serious problem of contraband wireless devices in correctional facilities.”

NCIC Correctional Services, another prison phone firm, said that jamming to create “‘dead zones’ within correctional facilities would permit smaller jails to restrict contraband device access where it is not cost-effective to install managed access systems.” Detection Innovation Group, which sells inmate-tracking technology to prisons and jails, also urged the FCC to allow jamming.

Telecom industry groups say that limiting the effect of jamming will be difficult or impossible. The harms identified over a decade ago “remain the same today, although their effects are magnified by the increased use of wireless devices for broadband,” said the Telecommunications Industry Association, a standards-development group. “If an RF jamming solution is deployed at a correctional facility, such deployment risks not only interfering with voice communications but disrupting vital broadband services as well within the facility itself as well as the surrounding community.”

Verizon told the FCC that the Communications Act “requires more restrictive use of jamming devices than the NPRM [Notice of Proposed Rulemaking] proposes.” The CTIA argued that jamming isn’t necessary because the wireless industry already offers Managed Access Systems (MAS) as “a safe and effective contraband interdiction ecosystem.”

A Managed Access System establishes “a private cellular network that captures communications (voice, text, data) on commercial wireless frequencies within a correctional facility, determines whether that exchange is coming from or going to a contraband device, and, if so, prevents those communications from connecting to the wireless provider’s network,” the CTIA said. “At the same time, MAS allows communications to and from approved devices to be transmitted without interruption, including 911 and public safety calls within the correctional facility.”

Wi-Fi and GPS groups warn of jamming risks

More opposition came from the Wi-Fi Alliance, a tech industry group that tests and certifies interoperability of Wi-Fi products. The FCC proposal failed to “address the potential impact of such jamming on lawfully operating Wi-Fi and other unlicensed devices,” the group told the FCC.

The FCC plan is not limited to jamming of phones on spectrum licensed for the exclusive use of wireless carriers. The FCC additionally sought comment on whether contraband devices operating on Wi-Fi airwaves and other unlicensed spectrum should be subject to jamming. That’s concerning to the Wi-Fi Alliance because Wi-Fi operates on unlicensed spectrum that is shared by many users.

“Accordingly, declaring that a jammer on unlicensed spectrum is permitted to disrupt the communications of another device also operating on unlicensed spectrum is contrary to the foundational principle of Part 15 [of FCC rules], under which all unauthorized devices must cooperate in the use of spectrum,” the group said. “Moreover, authorizing the use of jamming equipment in unlicensed spectrum pursuant to Part 15 would undermine decades of global spectrum policy, weaken trust in license-exempt technologies by providing no assurance that devices using those technologies will work, and set a dangerous precedent for the intentional misuse of unlicensed spectrum.”

Letting jammers interfere with Wi-Fi and other unlicensed devices would effectively turn the jammers into “a de facto licensed service, operating with primary status in bands that are designated for unlicensed use,” the Wi-Fi Alliance said. “To achieve that undesirable result, the Commission would be required to change the Table of Frequency Allocations and issue authorizations for operations on unlicensed spectrum (just as it contemplates for the use of cell phone spectrum in jamming devices). That outcome would upend the premise of Part 15 operations.”

The GPS Innovation Alliance, another industry group, warned that even if the FCC imposes strict limits on transmission power and out-of-band emissions, “jammer transmissions can have spillover effects on adjacent and nearby band operations. Only specialized, encrypted signals, and specialized receivers and devices designed to decrypt those signals, are jam-resistant, in contrast to how most commercial technologies work.”

Now that public comments are in, Carr has to decide whether to move ahead with the plan as originally written, scrap it entirely, or come up with a compromise that might address some of the concerns raised by opponents. The FCC’s NPRM suggests a pilot program could be used to evaluate interference risks before a broader rollout, and the pilot idea received some support from carriers in their comments. A final proposal would be put to a vote of commissioners at the Republican-majority FCC.

Letting prisons jam contraband phones is a bad idea, phone companies tell FCC Read More »

Dell’s XPS revival is a welcome reprieve from the “AI PC” fad

AI, CES 2026, dell, generative ai, laptops, Tech / Mike M. / January 6, 2026

After making the obviously poor decision to kill its XPS laptops and desktops in January 2025, Dell started selling 16- and 14-inch XPS laptops again today.

“It was obvious we needed to change,” Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and COO at Dell Technologies, said at a press event in New York City previewing Dell’s CES 2026 announcements.

A year ago, Dell abandoned XPS branding, as well as its Latitude, Inspiron, and Precision PC lineups. The company replaced the reputable brands with Dell Premium, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max. Each series included a base model, as well as “Plus” and “Premium.” Dell isn’t resurrecting its Latitude, Inspiron, or Precision series, and it will still sell “Dell Pro” models.

Dell's consumer and commercial PC lines. — This is how Dell breaks down its computer lineup now. Credit: Dell

XPS returns

The revival of XPS means the return of one of the easiest recommendations for consumer ultralight laptops. Before last year’s shunning, XPS laptops had a reputation for thin, lightweight designs with modern features and decent performance for the price. This year, Dell is even doing away with some of the design tweaks that it introduced to the XPS lineup in 2022, which, unfortunately, were shoppers’ sole option last year.

Inheriting traits from the XPS 13 Plus introduced in 2022, the XPS-equivalent laptops that Dell released in 2025 had a capacitive-touch row without physical buttons, a borderless touchpad with haptic feedback, and a flat, lattice-free keyboard. The design was meant to enable more thermal headroom but made using the computers feel uncomfortable and unfamiliar.

The XPS 14 and XPS 16 laptops launching today have physical function rows. They still have a haptic touchpad, but now the touchpad has comforting left and right borders. And although the XPS 14 and XPS 16 have the same lattice-free keyboard of the XPS 13 Plus, Dell will release a cheaper XPS 13 later this year with a more traditional chiclet keyboard, since those types of keyboards are cheaper to make.

Dell’s XPS revival is a welcome reprieve from the “AI PC” fad Read More »

SanDisk says goodbye to WD Blue and Black SSDs, hello to new “Optimus” drives

CES 2026, SanDisk, Tech, Western Digital / Mike M. / January 5, 2026

In late 2023, storage company Western Digital announced plans to split itself into two companies. One, which would still be called Western Digital, would focus on spinning hard drives, which are no longer used much in consumer systems but remain important to NAS devices and data centers. The other, called SanDisk, would handle solid-state storage, including the drives that Western Digital sold to consumers under its Blue, Black, Green, and Red brands.

That split effectively undid what Western Digital did a decade ago when it bought SanDisk for $19 billion. And we’re just now starting to see the way the split will affect the company’s existing consumer drives.

Today, SanDisk announced that mainstream WD Blue and WD Black SSDs would be discontinued and replaced by SanDisk Optimus-branded disks with the same model numbers.

WD Blue drives will now be “SanDisk Optimus” drives, starting with the Optimus 5100, a rebadged version of the WD Blue SN5100. Mid-tier WD Black drives will be branded as “SanDisk Optimus GX,” and the Optimus GX 7100 will replace the WD Black SN7100. And high-end WD Black drives will become “SanDisk Optimus GX Pro” SSDs, with the Optimus GX Pro 850X and 8100 replacing the WD Black SN850X and 8100 drives.

Given that these are all fast NVMe SSDs, I suspect the average user would have trouble detecting much of a difference between the low-end WD Blue/Optimus drives and the high-end WD Black/Optimus GX Pro SSDs. But the functional differences between the drives remain the same as before: the Blue/Optimus 5100 uses somewhat slower and less durable quad-level cell (QLC) flash memory, while the Black/Optimus GX 7100 uses triple-level cell (TLC) memory. The Black/Optimus GX Pro 8100 maximizes performance by stepping up to a PCIe 5.0 interface instead of PCIe 4.0 and including a dedicated DRAM cache (the 5100 and 7100 each claim a small chunk of your system RAM for this, called the Host Memory Buffer, or HMB). The 850X is a slightly older drive that keeps the dedicated DRAM but is also limited to PCIe 4.0 speeds.

SanDisk says goodbye to WD Blue and Black SSDs, hello to new “Optimus” drives Read More »

Author name: Mike M.