Amazon is shutting down Freevee, its free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) service, as it heightens focus on selling ads on its Prime Video subscription service.

Amazon, which has owned IMDb since 1998, launched Freevee as IMDb Freedive in 2019. The service let people watch movies and shows, including Freevee originals, on demand without a subscription fee. Amazon's streaming offering was also previously known as IMDb TV and rebranded to Amazon Freevee in 2022.

According to a report from Deadline this week, Freevee is being “phased out over the coming weeks,” but a firm closing date hasn’t been shared publicly.

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President-elect Donald Trump today announced that a new Department of Government Efficiency—or "DOGE"—will be led by Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Musk and Ramaswamy, who founded pharma company Roivant Sciences, "will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies," according to the Trump statement on Truth Social.

DOGE apparently will not be an official federal agency, as Trump said it will provide advice "from outside" of government. But Musk, who has frequently criticized government subsidies despite seeking public money and obtaining various subsidies for his own companies , will apparently have significant influence over spending in the Trump administration. Musk has also had numerous legal disputes with regulators at agencies that regulate his companies.

"Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of 'DOGE' for a very long time," Trump said. "To drive this kind of drastic change, the Department of Government Efficiency will provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before."

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By now, it has been firmly established that the Earth went through a series of global glaciations around 600 million to 700 million years ago, shortly before complex animal life exploded in the Cambrian. Climate models have confirmed that, once enough of a dark ocean is covered by reflective ice, it sets off a cooling feedback that turns the entire planet into an icehouse. And we've found glacial material that was deposited off the coasts in the tropics.

We have an extremely incomplete picture of what these snowball periods looked like, and Antarctic terrain provides different models for what an icehouse continent might look like. But now, researchers have found deposits that they argue were formed beneath a massive ice sheet that was being melted from below by volcanic activity. And, although the deposits are currently in Colorado's Front Range, at the time they resided much closer to the equator.

In the icehouse

Glacial deposits can be difficult to identify in deep time. Massive sheets of ice will scour the terrain down to bare rock, leaving behind loosely consolidated bits of rubble that can easily be swept away after the ice is gone. We can spot when that rubble shows up in ocean deposits to confirm there were glaciers along the coast, but rubble can be difficult to find on land.

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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.

There has been some debate about which product was the first modern “triple-A” video game, but ask most people and one answer is sure to at least be a contender: Valve’s Half-Life 2 .

For Western PC games, Half-Life 2 set a standard that held strong in developers’ ambitions and in players’ expectations for well over a decade. Despite that, there’s only so much new ground it truly broke in terms of how games are made and designed—it’s just that most games didn’t have the same commitment to scope, scale, and polish all at the same time.

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The classic PC games market is "in a sorry state," according to DRM-free and classic-minded storefront GOG. Small games that aren't currently selling get abandoned, and compatibility issues arise as technology moves forward or as one-off development ideas age like milk.

Classic games are only 20 percent of GOG's catalog, and the firm hasn't actually called itself "Good Old Games" in 12 years. And yet, today, GOG announces that it is making "a significant commitment of resources" toward a new GOG Preservation Program. It starts with 100 games for which GOG's own developers are working to create current and future compatibility, keeping them DRM-free and giving them ongoing tech support, along with granting them a "Good Old Game: Preserved by GOG" stamp.

Credit: GOG

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Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based company resurrected from bankruptcy , is riding high these days. In a few months, Firefly will attempt to become the second company to safely place a commercial lander on the Moon. Firefly's Alpha rocket has reached orbit four times, and engineers are developing a larger medium-class rocket in partnership with Northrop Grumman, one of the largest US aerospace and defense contractors.

There's also an orbital transfer vehicle, named Elytra, in Firefly's diversified portfolio. This diversification is proving attractive to investors. Firefly announced Tuesday that it completed a $175 million Series D fundraising round, resulting in a valuation of more than $2 billion. This follows a banner year of fundraising in 2023, when Firefly reported investors funneled approximately $300 million into the company at a valuation of $1.5 billion.

"Firefly is extremely grateful for our existing and new investors whose support demonstrates a huge vote of confidence in our capabilities and future," said Jason Kim, who took over as the company's CEO in October. He replaced Bill Weber, who resigned as chief executive after reports of an alleged inappropriate relationship with a female employee.

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Tesla has issued yet another recall for the angular, unpainted Cybertruck. This is the sixth recall affecting the model-year 2024 Cybertruck to be issued since January , and it affects 2,431 vehicles in total. And this time, there's no fix being delivered by a software update over the air—owners will need to have their pickup trucks physically repaired.

The problem is a faulty drive unit inverter , which stranded a Cybertruck at the end of July. Tesla says it started investigating the problem a week later and by late October arrived at the conclusion that it had made a bad batch of inverters that it used in production vehicles from November 6, 2023, until July 30, 2024. After a total of five failures and warranty claims that the company says "may be related to the condition," Tesla issued a recall.

Tesla is often able to fix defects in its products by pushing out new software, something that leads many fans of the brand to get defensive over the topic. Although there is no requirement for a safety recall to involve some kind of hardware fix— 20 percent of all car recalls are now software fixes —in this case, the solution to the failing inverters very much requires a technician to work on the affected trucks.

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Former US Air National Guard Jack Teixeira was sentenced to 15 years in prison for leaking confidential military documents on Discord .

Teixeira was arrested last year for sharing hundreds of pages of information online, some of which detailed national security secrets tied to US foreign adversaries and allies, including Russia, China, Ukraine, and South Korea. He secured the documents through his position at a Massachusetts military base, hoping to impress his young military-obsessed friends in a Discord group called "Thug Shaker Central."

Back in March, Teixeira pled guilty to six counts of “willful retention and transmission of national defense information." But in taking a plea deal, he got the government's bigger spy charges tossed, avoiding a much longer possible maximum sentence of 60 years.

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A British Columbia teen who contracted Canada's first known human case of H5 bird flu has deteriorated swiftly in recent days and is now in critical condition, health officials reported Tuesday.

The teen's case was announced Saturday by provincial health officials, who noted that teen had no obvious exposure to animals that could explain an infection with the highly pathogenic avian influenza. The teen tested positive for H5 bird flu at the BC's public health laboratory, and the result is currently being confirmed by the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.

The teen's case reportedly began with conjunctivitis, echoing the H5N1 human case reports in the US. The case then progressed to fever and cough, and the teen was admitted to BC's Children's hospital late Friday. The teen's condition varied throughout the weekend but had taken a turn for the worse by Tuesday, according to BC provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry.

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