SpaceX's Starlink Internet satellites are responsible for more and more public reports of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAPs), but most recent cases remain unsolved, according to a US government report released Thursday.

Starlinks often move across the sky in "trains" that appear like gleaming gems in the blackness of space. They are particularly visible to the naked eye shortly after each Starlink launch.

In recent years, leaks and disclosures from government officials have revitalized open discussion about mysterious lights and objects, some of which move in, to put it bluntly, unquestionably weird ways. Some of these images, particularly those from sophisticated instruments on military fighter jets , have made their way into the national discourse. The New Yorker, Ars' sister publication, has a thorough report on how UAPs—you might know them better as UFOs—became mainstream.

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A 7-year-old launch company that has yet to have a rocket successfully lift off announced a radical pivot on Thursday. Its new plan? Focusing on missile defense.

The founder and president of ABL Space Systems, Dan Piemont, announced the decision on LinkedIn , adding, "We're consolidating our operational footprint and parting ways with some talented members of our team." He said companies interested in hiring great people in Los Angeles or Mojave, California, should reach out.

A bright beginning

With a background in economics and physics, Piemont founded ABL in 2017 with the aim of developing a ship-and-shoot rocket. The idea was to set up mobile ground systems in remote locations on short notice and launch on demand for the US military and other customers.

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The Federal Trade Commission is preparing to launch an investigation into anti-competitive practices at Microsoft’s cloud computing business, as the US regulator continues to pursue Big Tech in the final weeks of Joe Biden’s presidency.

The FTC is examining allegations that Microsoft is abusing its market power in productivity software by imposing punitive licensing terms to prevent customers from moving their data from its Azure cloud service to competitors’ platforms, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Tactics being examined include substantially increasing subscription fees for those that leave, charging steep exit fees, and allegedly making its Office 365 products incompatible with rival clouds, they added.

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It's Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2 —a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day up through the 16th, we'll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.

The time has finally come to close one of the most notable gaps in my gaming history. Despite more than a decade of writing about video games and even more years enjoying them, I never got around to playing Half-Life 2 .

Not only have I not played it, but I've managed to keep myself in the dark about pretty much everything to do with it. I always assumed that one day I would get around to playing this classic, and I wanted the experience to be as close as possible to it would have been back in 2004. So my only knowledge about Half-Life 2 before starting this project was 1) the game is set in the same universe as Portal , a game I love, 2) the silent protagonist is named Gordon Freeman, and he looks uncannily like a silent, spectacled young Hugh Laurie, and 3) there's something called the Gravity Gun.

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Since ChatGPT became an instant hit roughly two years ago, tech companies around the world have rushed to release AI products while the public is still in awe of AI's seemingly radical potential to enhance their daily lives.

But at the same time, governments globally have warned it can be hard to predict how rapidly popularizing AI can harm society. Novel uses could suddenly debut and displace workers, fuel disinformation, stifle competition, or threaten national security—and those are just some of the obvious potential harms.

While governments scramble to establish systems to detect harmful applications—ideally before AI models are deployed—some of the earliest lawsuits over ChatGPT show just how hard it is for the public to crack open an AI model and find evidence of harms once a model is released into the wild. That task is seemingly only made harder by an increasingly thirsty AI industry intent on shielding models from competitors to maximize profits from emerging capabilities.

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I've never particularly loved Amazon, either as a retail behemoth or as a hardware and software company, but despite that I still probably get more excited about new Kindle releases than I do about most other gadgets at this point.

Some of that is because I rely on my Kindle for distraction-free reading and because I'm constantly highlighting things and taking notes, so even minor improvements have a major impact on my day-to-day experience. And some of it is because the Kindle's relatively limited tech has left it without a lot of headroom to shove additional ads or other paid add-ons; they include lockscreen ads and "special offers," but they can be permanently turned off with a nominal $20 fee, and even when you don't turn them off, they don't degrade the device's performance or intrude on the actual reading experience. This isn't to say that Kindles are perfect, just that it's rare that I am roughly the same amount of annoyed by a software platform's ads and tracking than I was a decade ago.

Enter the new 12th-generation $160 Kindle Paperwhite , which like most Paperwhites is the Kindle that most people should buy.

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Like Lee Hutchinson, I have a garage. The door on that garage is opened and closed by a device made by a company that, as with Lee's, offers you a way to open and close it with a smartphone app. But that app doesn't work with my preferred home automation system, Home Assistant , and also looks and works like an app made by a garage door company.

I had looked into the ratgdo Lee installed, and raved about , but hooking it up to my particular Genie/Aladdin system would have required installing limit switches . So I instead installed an OpenGarage unit ($50 plus shipping). My garage opener now works with Home Assistant (and thereby pretty much anything else), it's not subject to the whims of API access, and I've got a few ideas how to make it even better. Allow me to walk you through what I did, why I did it, and what I might do next.

Thanks, I’ll take it from here, Genie

Genie, maker of my Wi-Fi-capable garage door opener (sold as an "Aladdin Connect" system), is not in the same boat as the Chamberlain/myQ setup that inspired Lee's project. There was a working Aladdin Connect integration in Home Assistant, until the company changed its API in January 2024. Genie said it would release its own official Home Assistant integration in June, and it did, but then it was quickly pulled back, seemingly for licensing issues . Since then, no updates on the matter. (I have emailed Genie for comment and will update this post if I receive reply.)

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Some electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids are set to get less affordable from next year, it seems. As expected , the incoming Trump administration has set its sights on killing off the IRS clean vehicle tax credit, according to a report in Reuters this afternoon.

The clean vehicle tax credit was overhauled as part of President Joe Biden's signature climate legislation. Until then, the size of a plug-in vehicle's tax credit was based on its battery capacity, with a credit of up to $7,500 available. But from 2023 the rules changed , requiring a certain amount of domestic production to qualify, as well as adding price and income caps to address criticism that the tax credit mostly subsidized the already-wealthy.

Far fewer vehicles are now eligible for the rebate at time of purchase, particularly after the US Treasury Department got tougher about Chinese content , although a loophole means that none of these conditions apply to leased EVs.

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For some PC buyers, doing a clean install of Windows right out of the box is part of the setup ritual. But for Arm-based PCs, including the Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon X Plus and Elite chips in them, it hasn't been possible in the same way. Microsoft (mostly) hasn't offered generic install media that can be used to reinstall Windows on an Arm PC from scratch.

Microsoft is fixing that today—the company finally has a download page for the official Arm release of Windows 11, linked to but separate from the ISOs for the x86 versions of Windows . These are useful not just for because-I-feel-like-it clean installs, but for reinstalling Windows after you've upgraded your SSD and setting up Windows virtual machines on Arm-based PCs and Macs.

Previously, Microsoft did offer install media for some Windows Insider Preview Arm builds , though these are for beta versions of Windows that may or may not be feature-complete or stable. Various apps, scripts, and websites also exist to grab files from Microsoft's servers and build "unofficial" ISOs for the Arm version of Windows, though obviously this is more complicated than just downloading a single file directly.

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