Elon Musk is seemingly done attacking Apple over its decision to integrate ChatGPT into iPhone features.

Back in 2024, when the partnership was first announced, Musk slammed the integration as an agreement from Apple to let OpenAI install “creepy spyware” on users’ devices. The next year, he sued, claiming the partnership gave the firms a “monopoly” on Apple users’ AI prompts, which allegedly harmed competition in both smartphone and chatbot markets.

For Musk, the fight with Apple seemingly escalated after he believed that his chatbot, Grok, was perhaps being illegally blocked from topping Apple’s App Store rankings. Last August, he claimed that “Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation.”

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The US is not backing down from its fight to deport noncitizen technology researchers who monitor safety risks on the biggest online platforms.

In July, a judge blocked as unconstitutional an immigration policy that the US relied on to weigh whether to detain and deport people who flag illegal or harmful online content as national security risks. In his announcement of the policy, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that by targeting a list of researchers—which he stood “ready and willing” to expand—the policy supposedly served to prevent foreign nationals from manipulating digital town squares and censoring Americans.

However, in his order siding with the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) and staying the policy, US District Judge James Boasberg said the US showed no evidence linking any targeted researchers to a foreign power that might be attempting to censor Americans or manipulate US public debate. Deemed too broad, the policy could sweep in seemingly any noncitizen working in content moderation, the judge said.

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It wasn’t that long ago that ClickFix attacks were exotic. Now the technique has become mainstream as attackers reap its simplicity and effectiveness in infecting users of PCs and Macs alike. All that’s required is a compromised website—a painless enough task—a fake CAPTCHA overlay, and the inclusion of a single terminal command. So many visitors get suckered into pasting and running the command that just about every malware pusher has adopted the technique. Even Kremlin-backed hacking groups are joining in.

“Reddit is becoming post after post after post of people getting their computer infected via ClickFix,” independent researcher Kevin Beaumont observed Thursday. “Legit websites everywhere [are] getting hacked to serve the fake captcha prompts.”

How many of us make things worse

More seasoned Internet users—a fair number who read this site—are quick to dismiss the attack. They typically blame the people who fall for the scams and marvel at their gullibility and lack of attention. The reality is that for more casual users, using computers and the Internet has become so difficult—think impossible-to-close interstitials, CAPTCHAs with an endless series of pictures to analyze, and constantly changing interfaces that bury the features they’re looking for—that they have grown desensitized to instructions that seem ridiculous and burdensome.

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I'm on record expressing a certain amount of skepticism about Mike Flanagan's rebooted Carrie miniseries for Prime Video. We don’t need another disappointing remake, so what story is there left to tell—especially stretched out over six episodes?

On the plus side, I'm a staunch fan of Flanagan's excellent Netflix horror fare, and he has a particular affinity for the works of Stephen King. He insists he has no intention of creating yet another straight adaptation of the novel.

“Carrie was written half a century ago,” Flanagan said at San Diego Comic-Con earlier this year. “Carrie was adapted spectacularly by Brian De Palma. It is iconic. It is untouchable. There is no reason whatsoever to try to follow in those footsteps and to try to walk on that path. However, the world has changed quite a lot. I think a lot of people think they know what the show is. And the biggest thing I’m excited about today is just knowing what a big surprise our Carrie is going to be.”

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Those who remember PC gaming in the days before Steam may have fond memories of the "big box" packaging that made those games stand out as shelf eye candy and sought-after in-home collectibles. Today, PC gaming platform GOG is hoping to reignite some of the nostalgia for those days by adding downloadable 3D models and printable, foldable high-res packaging scans for a handful of PC games on the platform.

Thus far, the "Printable Big Box" collection on GOG is limited to just five games: Armikrog, Descent, Hitman: Codename 47, Myst, and Star Trek: 25th Anniversary. Players browsing those games on the GOG store will now see "3D Boxes" listed among the included "Goodies" before purchase. Owners of those games on GOG can download a ZIP file containing a version of the box art as an animated 3D object file (in an easy-to-open GLB format) and a "flat printable template" in PDF, SVG, and Adobe Illustrator formats. Those downloads allow for what GOG calls "a proper papercraft project for anyone who misses shelves full of PC game boxes."

The 3D model animates to show the front flap opening. Credit: GOG

"Physical media doesn’t survive the way software can—boxes get lost, crushed, thrown out," GOG writes in today's announcement. "Scanning them, and letting you print your own, is preservation in a different shape: the same mission that keeps these games running on modern PCs, applied to the objects they used to come in."

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Leading chipmakers Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. announced plans to adopt ASML’s latest chipmaking machines in the next several years—and they also joined Intel in agreeing to a crucial technology change that could boost chip production on the new machines by 40 percent.

This signifies the semiconductor industry’s broader embrace of high NA EUV photolithography technology that can cost up to $400 million per machine and is only provided by the Dutch technology company ASML, Bloomberg reports. The technology would allow chip designers to implement even smaller features in potentially more powerful and efficient next-generation chips produced for AI data centers and consumer electronics such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

ASML’s EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography machines enable chipmakers to use powerful laser light to imprint patterns in silicon wafers, layer by layer, and gradually form the computer circuitry that makes silicon chips work. Compared to older deep ultraviolet lithography, EUV technology harnesses a more powerful source of light with a shorter wavelength to create even smaller features on silicon wafers.

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On Thursday, Elon Musk’s X won a court order blocking Operation Bluebird from launching a new app taking over the Twitter name.

In his opinion, Chief Judge Colm Connolly explained that Operation Bluebird was unlikely to prove that X had entirely abandoned the Twitter name. Therefore, X was likely to succeed on trademark infringement and dilution claims tied to the platform’s former name.

Most compellingly, X argued that it still uses the Twitter name in the current listing for the X app in Apple’s App Store. In the first sentence of that listing, written in the same size font as the rest of the text, a single clause clinched the early court win for X by stating, “Welcome to X (formerly known as Twitter).”

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In 2020, Microsoft announced that Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions would include unlimited access to its new Xbox Cloud Gaming service (then still known as Project xCloud). Now, that kind of streaming buffet service is coming to an end, as Microsoft announced strict new limits on how much streaming is included in its various Game Pass subscriptions.

Starting in November, Game Pass subscriptions will include the following monthly limits on game streaming time:

• Game Pass Ultimate ($23/month): 15 hours
• Game Pass Premium ($15/month): 10 hours
• Game Pass Essential ($10/month): 5 hours

Subscribers who use up their monthly streaming allotment will be able to buy additional time, Microsoft said, without sharing specific pricing or availability for that streaming time. Access to downloadable versions of games included in a Game Pass subscription remains unaffected.

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There are, by various estimates, several trillion planets within what is known as the Local Group of galaxies—our closest galaxy neighbors, including our own Milky Way. Many of these planets are within the habitable zone of their stars. So if life finds a way, where are the alien civilizations?

This is the crux of what is known as the Fermi paradox, which posits that if life is fairly common in the Universe, humans should have collected credible evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations by now. People who think about this paradox believe there may be some "filter" that limits or entirely prevents an advanced civilization from sending out probes or even life-bearing spacecraft to nearby stars.

Philip Johnston is someone who thinks a lot about the Fermi paradox. A mathematician and physicist from the United Kingdom, Johnston has gained some notoriety lately in the space community as one of the biggest proponents of orbital data centers. He co-founded Starcloud in 2024 to develop such data centers, and the company is presently valued at $2.3 billion.

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For decades, console owners have faced a choice between the convenience of digital downloads and the permanence of physical game discs. Soon, Xbox owners will be able to get the best of both worlds for thousands of supported titles as part of a newly announced disc-to-digital program.

The program—announced today ahead of testing for Xbox Insiders starting August 31—will let players claim a "digital entitlement" for "most Xbox One and Xbox Series X disc-based games" simply by inserting the disc into a console and launching it. That game will then be playable completely digitally, without the need to ever insert the disc, as long as you (or a member of your family account) is logged in. The digital entitlement will also allow access to features like Xbox Play Anywhere (for play on PC) and Xbox Cloud Gaming, for supported titles.

Microsoft says that your physical disc will "continue to work exactly as it always has" after the digital entitlement is claimed. But before you get any ideas, the fine print on the announcement mentions that there is only "one revokable license per game disc," so if you resell that disc or loan it to a friend, that digital entitlement could be transferred to a new account when someone else puts it into their console.

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SpaceX made Florida's Space Coast home to the world's busiest spaceport for a decade, but that will change this year. The company is significantly cutting the number of launches from Florida until Starship arrives, a senior SpaceX official confirmed Tuesday.

The Falcon 9 rocket has been SpaceX's workhorse, routinely launching batches of satellites for the company's Starlink network, primarily from launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There were 165 Falcon 9 launches last year—about three flights per week—and about 75 percent of them carried Starlink satellites.

This year is different. SpaceX has launched more missions from its West Coast launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California since January, and this trend will amplify for the rest of the year.

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Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said Tuesday that SpaceX will commit $100 billion to develop Starship factories and launch pads in the state's coastal areas. In doing so, the company seeks to replicate the Starbase facility it has built over the last decade in southern Texas on a larger scale.

The announcement capped months of speculation about SpaceX's interest in a sprawling parcel of land along the Gulf coast of Louisiana, which offers room to build multiple launch towers and offers access to the methane propellant that fuels the Starship rocket.

Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, said the "Starbase Louisiana" facility would become a self-sustaining spaceport with propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping capabilities, vehicle processing facilities, and an airport on site.

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Chinese retailer AliExpress has been caught fingerprinting visitors after one of the metrics—an outdated technique that measures inaudible sounds it sends to browsers—impeded a researcher's ability to use his bluetooth headphones.

Researcher Matthew Callaghan said he stumbled on the stealthy tracking by mistake. After loading the AliExpress homepage, audio from his phone stopped playing over his multipoint headphones, which accept connections from more than one device at a time. He set the headphones to play sounds from his phone except when his PC was producing audio. Each time he loaded AliExpress, the phone audio stopped. Each time he closed the tab the site was loaded into, the phone was once again audible.

Users can't hear it, but browsers can

While investigating the odd behavior, Callaghan said he found two highly obfuscated scripts. Together, they rendered a graph that analyzed the WebAudio readings of each visiting browser. This graph acted as an oscillator that measured Sawtooth waves, which are common in output from digital audio.

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