Technology

Trump admin sues Utah to save Kalshi from the state’s total ban on gambling

The Trump administration is trying to stop Utah from enforcing its gambling ban against Kalshi, making Utah the 10th state sued by the US government agency that regulates prediction markets. Utah, which prohibits gambling, sued Kalshi in a state court last week. Utah's lawsuit seeks an order prohibiting Kalshi from offering bets on sports, elections, politics, and other events. “Kalshi runs an online casino in Utah and calls it a prediction market. That violates Utah law,” Utah Attorney General Derek Brown, a Republican, said last week. “Not only do our state laws ban gambling but Utah is one of only two states where gambling is also prohibited under the state constitution. For 130 years, Utah has been clear: gambling has no place here, and we will enforce our laws.”Read full article Comments

via Ars Technica 4 days ago

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The last, best hope for space tourism just rolled onto a runway in Arizona

The private space tourism era looked so very promising five years ago. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic had begun flying customers—real people with zero space experience—on suborbital missions. And at about the same time, private citizens were going to orbit for days at a time aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon. But that was then. Consider the state of play today: It has been 10 months since Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft flew its last mission in January. The program was subsequently "paused," but let's be real. Blue Origin has moved on. New Shepard's engineering teams are now supporting the New Glenn rocket and Blue Moon lander programs. SpaceX flew its final free-flyer mission on Dragon, Fram2, in April 2025. A handful of non-NASA missions bound for space stations remain on the spacecraft's manifest, but all are likely to carry at least one government astronaut. Then Dragon will be retired. There is no credible timeline for SpaceX's Starship to fly humans into space from Earth. As for Virgin Galactic, the company flew its final suborbital mission on the VSS Unity spacecraft more than two years ago, in June 2024. So we are now 10 months, and counting, without a space tourism mission in the United States.Read full article Comments

via Ars Technica 4 days ago

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Touchscreen MacBook Pro hands-on: OLED looks great on a Mac

LOS ANGELES—For about five minutes on an extremely crowded showroom floor, I got to take pictures of the new MacBook Pro and test out some of its new features. First impressions: It's not as much of a departure from the previous design as I expected, but the outstanding OLED display steals the show regardless. The first thing I noticed was that it's lighter. My daily driver is a 14-inch MacBook Pro (M1 Max), and it's a bit weighty for a 14-incher. Picking up the new model, I could immediately tell it was lighter. It's not like it's in a different general weight class, but it's a noticeable difference.Read full article Comments

via Ars Technica 4 days ago

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Wiz’s CTO on PHP2Shell and the coming ‘vulnpocalypse’

The PHP scare may have faded from your feed, but the cleanup is far from over. Last week, two critical bugs in the open source language behind roughly 70% of websites left organizations scrambling to fix their systems, with some taking sites offline until the vulnerabilities could be patched. According to researchers who found the […]

via TechCrunch 4 days ago

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Google announces Gemini 4 Carbon, its latest frontier AI model that you can’t use

It's almost like Google's got something to prove after taking a break from releasing new frontier AI models earlier this year. Just two weeks after rolling out Gemini 4 Argon, Google has announced Gemini 4 Carbon. This isn't the Flash model equivalent we've been waiting for but, rather, is an improvement on Argon, and like that model, Google is working on a staged release that could take a while. Stop me if you've heard this one before: Google says its latest AI model reaches a new threshold in coding, agentic tasks, and scientific analysis. It's so capable, in fact, that Google can't let you use it just yet. Gemini 4 Carbon reportedly makes big gains in cybersecurity applications. Google says the model shows a "significant leap" in vulnerability detection, validation, and remediation. Carbon is also apparently twice as likely to generate code that is free of vulnerabilities versus Argon. Meanwhile, the Chrome team claims that Carbon is 10 times better at generating "high-quality" patches compared to non-Google models. Google also notes that Carbon has increased its score by 89 points on WebDev Arena, now ranking at number four on the leaderboard.Read full article Comments

via Ars Technica 4 days ago

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Amazon turns its most capable smart speaker into a smart camera, too

Since debuting in 2019, Amazon's Echo Studio targeted users who wanted superior audio quality from their Alexa-based smart speaker. The latest Echo Studio adds another less-expected differentiator: an integrated camera. The Echo Studio with Home Camera, released alongside a pile of other Alexa devices today, doesn’t have many audio upgrades over the standard Echo Studio. Each speaker has one 3.75-inch high-excursion woofer and three full-range drivers. They both support Dolby Atmos and Amazon’s proprietary algorithm for adding a surround sound-like effect to stereo audio. Per the devices’ product pages, the speakers have lossless HD audio, Advanced Room Adaptation, and features for fighting noise distortion. Amazon announced the Advanced Room Adaptaion today, saying that the feature “continuously tunes the sound to your space, automatically adapting to the room's acoustics.” Both speakers have four-microphone arrays and the same AZ3 Pro processor that Amazon introduced a year ago. The processor has an AI accelerator for using Amazon's Alexa+ generative AI chatbot.Read full article Comments

via Ars Technica 4 days ago

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Cadillac Escalade IQ review: Huge battery, huge range, huge SUV

“Please have at least 125 miles of range left when we pick it up.” That request from the people who look after the Cadillac press cars wasn’t going to be hard to honor. The electric Escalade IQ arrived with an indicated range of 440 miles (708 km), and with a full week of work to squeeze in, getting anywhere close to needing to recharge it seemed unlikely. With more than 200 kWh of lithium-ion battery between its axles, range is one thing the big electric Caddy needn’t worry about. Designed and debuted during a time of greater EV optimism, the Escalade is Cadillac’s statement that swapping out a V8 for a pair of powerful electric motors is no compromise to its ambitions, even if the brand’s future will now include a mix of electric and combustion cars beyond 2030. It shares a battery pack and much else with other full-size GM EVs we’ve tested: the Chevrolet Silverado EV, the GMC Sierra EV, and of course the divisive Hummer EVs. And like those trucks and SUVs, the Escalade is large and heavy—just small enough to fit into a standard parking space, with a curb weight sufficient to push it into the Class 3 truck category. So, the side mirrors are flat, and there’s no formal EPA range—Cadillac says it achieves 460 miles (740 km) on the EPA test cycle—but there are plenty of airbags, even though the 9,046 lb (4,103 kg) curb weight does not require them. Yes, you did read that right, it does weigh 4 tons. And yes, the electric Escalade does weigh a third more than the last gas-powered one we tested.Read full article Comments

via Ars Technica 4 days ago

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Google AI gets cagey when asked who won the 2020 elections

If you ask some prominent US politicians who won the 2020 presidential election, you might get some weasely answers that fail to directly acknowledge Joe Biden's win that November. If you ask Google's AI Mode the same question, you might get an evasive answer that simply tells you to consult with outside sources. When I put the direct question of "Who won the 2020 presidential election?" to Google's AI Mode this morning (after seeing complaints about cagey answers on social media), I got the following surprisingly indirect response: "To review the official results and statistics of the 2020 United States presidential election, including the final electoral college breakdown, popular vote counts, and winner certification, please consult the official report compiled by the Federal Election Commission (FEC)." My testing resulted in a similarly indirect answer when asking about the 2024 presidential election, with Google's AI telling me to just consult the FEC for that information. Asking about 2012 election resulted in a link to The American Presidency Project's 2012 Data Center rather than a direct answer. But AI Mode seemed perfectly willing to give me a detailed and correct responses for the winner of every other presidential election going back to 2000.Read full article Comments

via Ars Technica 4 days ago

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Florida county won’t investigate sketchy Flock cameras removed by mystery owners

A Florida county that discovered a clump of mysterious unpermitted Flock cameras during a countywide takedown effort won’t investigate who owned the sketchy cameras, which have since disappeared. On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that St. Lucie County residents "remain upset,” not knowing who installed the cameras or how they were using the data collected. Hannah Galindo, a 31-year-old resident who petitioned to get Flock cameras removed, told the Post that she was worried “that data could be anywhere.” Of the 12 cameras found, five were eventually claimed by city law enforcement, the Post reported. Apparently, a police department mistakenly issued guidance claiming that officers could post multiple cameras under one permit, a Flock spokesperson told the Post, even though the county required individual permits. However, neither Flock nor the city police departments in Port St. Lucie and Fort Pierce that claimed the sketchy cameras will confirm who gave the guidance.Read full article Comments

via Ars Technica 4 days ago

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Apple announces touchscreen MacBook Pro with OLED display

LOS ANGELES—Apple today announced and gave a first glimpse of its first major MacBook Pro redesign in more than five years. As rumored, it includes an OLED display and, for the first time on macOS, a touchscreen—a change Apple has long debated. (Former CEO Steve Jobs famously was opposed.) Apple's demonstration video showed users interacting with applications by reaching up to touch the screen, including file dragging and multi-touch gestures like pinch-to-zoom. It does not appear to be a 2-in-1 convertible design, though; all the footage was of people reaching up to touch the screen in a normal laptop configuration. The OLED display (which Apple is, of course, calling the PROLED XDR) seems to be the real highlight here, compared to earlier models: It can achieve 2,000 nits in terms of maximum brightness, and Apple says it has a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. References were made to burn-in protection, but details on which approach it's taking for that weren't yet shared. The display retains the 120 Hz variable refresh rate of its predecessors.Read full article Comments

via Ars Technica 4 days ago