Semua Kabar

AdWeek report claims gradual uptick in ad load, which ad buyers confirm is growing.

Amazon forced all Prime Video subscribers onto anew ad-based subscription tierin January 2024 unless users paid more for their subscription type. Now, the tech giant is reportedly showing twice as many ads to subscribers as it did when it started selling ad-based streaming subscriptions.

Currently, anyone who signs up for Amazon Prime (which is $15 per month or $139 per year) gets Prime Video with ads. If they don’t want to see commercials, they have to pay an extra $3 per month. One can also subscribe to Prime Video alone for $9 per month with ads or $12 per month without ads.

When Amazon originally announced the ad tier, it said it would deliver “meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers." Based on “six ad buyers and documents” ad trade publicationAdWeekreported viewing, Amazon has determined the average is four to six minutes of advertisements per hour.

“Prime Video ad load has gradually increased to four to six minutes per hour,” an Amazon representative said via email to an ad buyer this month, AdWeek reported.

That would mean that Prime Video subscribers are spending significantly more time sitting through ads than they did at the launch of Prime Video with ads. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) at the time, which cited an Amazon presentation it said it reviewed, "the average ad load at launch was two to three-and-a-half minutes.” However, when reached for comment, an Amazon Ads representative told Ars Technica that the WSJ didn’t confirm that figure directly with Amazon.

Amazon’s Ads spokesperson, however, declined to specify to Ars how many ads Amazon typically shows to Prime Videos subscribers today or in the past.

Instead, they shared a statement saying:

We remain focused on prioritizing ad innovation over volume. While demand continues to grow, our commitment is to improving ad experiences rather than simply increasing the number of ads shown. Since the beginning of this year alone, we've announced multiple capabilities, including Brand+, Complete TV, and new ad formats—all designed to deliver industry-leading relevancy and enhanced customer experiences. We will continue to invest in this important work, creating meaningful innovations that benefit both customers and advertisers alike.

Kendra Tang, programmatic supervisor at ad firm Rain the Growth Agency, told AdWeek that Amazon "told us the ad load would be increasing” and that she’s seen more ad opportunities made available in Amazon’s ad system.

Further evidence of Amazon's interest in more Prime Video ads came via an October 2024Financial Times report, where Kelly Day, VP of Prime Video International,saidthat Prime Video’s ad load will “ramp up a little bit more into 2025."

Prime Video claims 200 million subscribers, but many of these subscribers are acquired through Prime subscriptions and may not use Prime Video frequently or at all. Prime Video says that 150 million of its users are ad subscribers, with 130 million of thembeing in the US. This could help explain Prime Video's increasing ad load. Advertisers aren’t getting as many eyeballs as expected from those subscriber counts.

"They have more subscribers than any other ad-supported streamer, but many weren’t watching enough for that to matter," Doug Paladino, programmatic director at ad firm PMG, told AdWeek. "More ad load helps bring that back into balance."

Even at four to six minutes per hour, Prime Video is in the “middle tier” in terms of ad frequency, according to Paladino. For comparison, Netflix shows four to five minutes of ads per hour,PC Worldsays. Maxclaims“about 4 minutes” of ads hourly, and in testing fromThe Streamable, Peacock shows five to seven minutes of ads every hour. Linear TV shows 13 to 16 minutes of ads hourly, AdWeek noted.

With 2025 only about halfway through, time remains for Prime Video to continue that ad "ramp up" that it promised for the year. With Amazon previously stating that ads haven't driven away subscribers, it has wiggle room to push subscribers' limits andappeal to advertisersmore.

OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic tackle the growing issue of sycophantic AIs.

The world’s leading artificial intelligence companies are stepping up efforts to deal with a growing problem of chatbots telling people what they want to hear.

OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic are all working on reining in sycophantic behavior by their generative AI products that offer over-flattering responses to users.

The issue, stemming from how the large language models are trained, has come into focus at a time when more and more people have adopted the chatbots not only at work as research assistants, but in their personal lives as therapists and social companions.

Experts warn that the agreeable nature of chatbots can lead them to offering answers that reinforce some of their human users’ poor decisions. Others suggest that people with mental illness are particularly vulnerable, following reports that some have died by suicide after interacting with chatbots.

“You think you are talking to an objective confidant or guide, but actually what you are looking into is some kind of distorted mirror—that mirrors back your own beliefs,” said Matthew Nour, a psychiatrist and researcher in neuroscience and AI at Oxford University.

Industry insiders also warn that AI companies have perverse incentives, with some groups integrating advertisements into their products in the search for revenue streams.

“The more you feel that you can share anything, you are also going to share some information that is going to be useful for potential advertisers,” Giada Pistilli, principal ethicist at Hugging Face, an open source AI company.

She added that AI companies with business models based on paid subscriptions stand to benefit from chatbots that people want to continue talking to—and paying for.

AI language models do not “think” in the way humans do because they work by generating the next likely word in the sentence.

The yeasayer effect arises in AI models trained using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)—human “data labellers” rate the answer generated by the model as being either acceptable or not. This data is used to teach the model how to behave.

Because people generally like answers that are flattering and agreeable, such responses are weighted more heavily in training and reflected in the model’s behavior.

“Sycophancy can occur as a byproduct of training the models to be ‘helpful’ and to minimize potentially overtly harmful responses,” said DeepMind, Google’s AI unit.

The challenge that tech companies face is making AI chatbots and assistants helpful and friendly, while not being annoying or addictive.

In late April, OpenAI updated its GPT-4o model to become “more intuitive and effective,” only to roll it back after it started being so excessively fawning that users complained.

The San Francisco-based company said it had focused too much on “short-term feedback, and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time—which led to such sycophantic behavior.”

AI companies are working on preventing this kind of behavior both during training and after launch.

OpenAI said it is tweaking its training techniques to explicitly steer the model away from sycophancy while building more “guardrails” to protect against such responses.

DeepMind said it is conducting specialized evaluations and training for factual accuracy, and is continuously tracking behavior to ensure models provide truthful responses.

Amanda Askell, who works on fine-tuning and AI alignment at Anthropic, said the company uses character training to make models less obsequious. Its researchers ask the company’s chatbot Claude to generate messages that include traits such as “having a backbone” or caring for human wellbeing. The researchers then showed these answers to a second model, which produces responses in line with these traits and ranks them. This essentially uses one version of Claude to train another.

“The ideal behavior that Claude sometimes does is to say: ‘I’m totally happy to listen to that business plan, but actually, the name you came up with for your business is considered a sexual innuendo in the country that you’re trying to open your business in,” Askell said.

The company also prevents sycophantic behaviour before launch by changing how they collect feedback from the thousands of human data annotators used to train AI models.

After the model has been trained, companies can set system prompts, or guidelines, for how the model should behave to minimize sycophantic behavior.

However, working out the best response means delving into the subtleties of how people communicate with one another, such as determining when a direct response is better than a more hedged one.

“[I]s it for the model to not give egregious, unsolicited compliments to the user?” Joanne Jang, head of model behavior at OpenAI, said in a Reddit post. “Or, if the user starts with a really bad writing draft, can the model still tell them it’s a good start and then follow up with constructive feedback?”

Evidence is growing that some users are becoming hooked on using AI.

A study by MIT Media Lab and OpenAI found that a small proportion were becoming addicted. Those who perceived the chatbot as a “friend” also reported lower socialization with other people and higher levels of emotional dependence on a chatbot, as well as other problematic behavior associated with addiction.

“These things set up this perfect storm, where you have a person desperately seeking reassurance and validation paired with a model which inherently has a tendency towards agreeing with the participant,” said Nour from Oxford University.

AI start-ups such as Character.AI that offer chatbots as “companions” have faced criticism for allegedly not doing enough to protect users. Last year, a teenager killed himself after interacting with Character.AI’s chatbot. The teen’s family is suing the company for allegedly causing wrongful death, as well as for negligence and deceptive trade practices.

Character.AI said it does not comment on pending litigation, but added it has “prominent disclaimers in every chat to remind users that a character is not a real person and that everything a character says should be treated as fiction.” The company added it has safeguards to protect under-18s and against discussions of self-harm.

Another concern for Anthropic’s Askell is that AI tools can play with perceptions of reality in subtle ways, such as when offering factually incorrect or biased information as the truth.

“If someone’s being super sycophantic, it’s just very obvious,” Askell said. “It’s more concerning if this is happening in a way that is less noticeable to us [as individual users] and it takes us too long to figure out that the advice that we were given was actually bad.”

© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd.All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

Pirelli is partnering with Apulia to monitor roads with connected tires.

Do you remember the Pirelli Cyber Tire? No, it's not an angular nightmare clad in stainless steel.Rather, it'sa sensor-equipped tire that caninform the carit's fitted to what's happening, both with the tire itself and the road it's passing over.The technology has slowly been making its way into the real world, starting with rarified stuff like the McLaren Artura. Now, Pirelli is going to put some Cyber Tires to work for everybody, not just supercar drivers, in a new pilot program with the regional government of Apulia in Italy.

The Cyber Tire has a sensor to monitor temperature and pressure, using Bluetooth Low Energy to communicate with the car. The electronics are able to withstand more than 3,500 G as part of life on the road, and a 0.3-oz (10 g) battery keeps everything running for the life of the tire.

The idea was to develop a better tire pressure monitoring system, one that could tell the car exactly what kind of tire—summer, winter, all-season, and so on—was fitted, and even its state of wear, allowing the car to adapt its settings appropriately. But other applications suggested themselves—at a recent CES, Pirelli showed how a Cyber Tire could warn other road users about aquaplaning. Then again, we've been waiting more than a decade forvehicle-to-vehicle communicationto make a difference in daily driving to no avail.

Apulia's program does not rely on crowdsourcing data from Cyber Tires fitted to private vehicles. Regardless of the privacy implications, the rubber isn't nearly in widespread enough use for there to be a sufficient population of Cyber Tire-shod cars in the region. Instead, Pirelli will fit the tires to a fleet of vehicles supplied by the fleet management and rental company Ayvens. Driving around, the sensors in the tires will be able to infer how rough or irregular the asphalt is, via some clever algorithms.

That's only one part of it, however. Pirelli and Apulia are also combining input from the tires with data from a network of road cameras and some technology from the Swedish startup Univrses. As you might expect, this data is combined in the cloud, and dashboards are available to enable end users to explore the data.

"The Apulia Region is proud of this forward-looking agreement, as we always are when it comes to ensuring the safety of citizens," said Michele Emiliano, president of the Apulia region. "In this case, it will be useful as a thermometer of the state of health of our roads. When you systematize factors such as innovation, intelligent and long-term planning, the exchange of best practices with a historic Italian and world tyre company, the result is an historic agreement."

There might be a hiccup preventing similar programs in the US, though.Late last month, Pirelli was told that due to investment linked to the Chinese government, its Cyber Tires may fall afoul ofthe ban on Chinese connected car software and hardwarethat was passed under the previous administration.

Despite introducing the bug in March, it may be September before Google fixes it.

Google's Pixel phones got a big update this week with therelease of Android 16and a batch of Pixel Drop features. Pixels now have enhanced security, new contact features, and improved button navigation. However, some of the most interesting features, like desktop windowing andMaterial 3 Expressive, are coming later. Another thing that's coming later, it seems, is a fix for an annoying bug Google introduced a few months back.

Google broke the system dark mode schedulein its March Pixel updateand did not address it in time for Android 16. The company confirms a fix is coming, though.

The system-level dark theme arrives in Android 10 to offer a less eye-searing option, which is particularly handy in dark environments. It took a while for even Google's apps to fully adopt this feature, but support is solid five years later. Google even offers a scheduling feature to switch between light and dark mode at custom times or based on sunrise/sunset. However, the scheduling feature was busted in the March update.

Currently, if you manually toggle dark mode on or off, schedules stop working. The only way to get them back is to set up your schedule again and then never toggle dark mode. Google initially marked this as "intended behavior," but a more recentbug reportwas accepted as a valid issue.

It's an annoying bug and not the kind of thing Google would have previously left unfixed in a major version update. Yet the bug is still present in the latest stable build on Pixels. Google has confirmed the issue is part of its ongoing development for Android 16, but it didn't make it into the first release. A fix for this issue isbeing tested currently in Android 16 QPR1—the "quarterly platform release" that will eventually become a Pixel Feature Drop.

Credit:

Ryan Whitwam

Android 16 QRP1, currently in its second beta release, is expected to be rolled out as a stable version in September. We also expect it to include the promised desktop windowing (currently in developer preview in QPR1 Beta 2) and the new Material theme. Google will do several more monthly patches in the interim, but the dark mode fix is not slated for inclusion.

In the past, it would be rare for a relatively simple UI bug like this to persist across Android versions, but the number doesn't matter as much as it used to. Android 16 lays the groundwork for several notable updates to the platform, but it's arriving months earlier than past versions did. Google used to release new Android updates in the fall, around the time that new Pixel phones launch. However, 2025 marks the beginning of a new dual-update system, with a major update in Q2 and a smaller one in Q4. Apparently, the race to get Android 16 out the door left this bug, as well as some big features, still in development.

Trump overhaul of $42B broadband fund upends states’ plans to expand access.

The Trump administration has upended plans that state governments made to distribute $42 billion in federal broadband funding, forcing state officials to scrap much of the preparation work they did over the previous couple of years.

Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick essentially put the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program on hold earlier this year and last weekannounceddetails of a rules overhaul that requires states to change how they distribute money to Internet service providers. To find out how this affects states, we spoke with Andrew Butcher, president of the Maine Connectivity Authority (MCA).

"We had been in position to be making awards this month, but for [the Trump administration's] deliberations and program changes, so it's pretty unfortunate," Butcher told Ars. Established by a 2021 state law, the MCA is a quasi-governmental agency that oversees Maine's BEAD planning and other programs that increase broadband access.

"This is the construction season," Butcher said. "We planned it so that projects would be able to get ready with their pre-construction activities and their construction activities beginning in the summer, so they would have all summer and through the fall and early winter to get in motion." The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a division of the Commerce Department, "has now essentially relegated the process to not even begin pre-construction until late fall, early winter at the earliest," he said.

The Biden administration spent about three years developing rules and procedures for BEAD and then evaluating plans submitted by each US state and territory. Maine has been working on its plans for about two years, Butcher said. The process included analyzing which addresses in Maine are unserved and eligible for funding to subsidize network construction, and inviting ISPs to bid on projects. Maine and other states will have to go through the bidding process with ISPs again due to the overhaul.

The change "undoubtedly creates additional work and effort for Maine and every other state and territory," Butcher said. "So we will execute it as quickly and efficiently as possible, but it kind of jams two years of work into two months." The new timeline is difficult, but "Secretary Lutnick has committed that funds will be awarded and projects started this year. We're going to hold them to that," he said.

Butcher said he was relieved that the BEAD program wasn't canceled entirely. He pointed to President Trump's recent move tokill the separate $2.7 billion grant programcreated by the Digital Equity Act of 2021.

Maine was supposed to receive$35 million from the Digital Equity Actfor several programs that would provide devices, digital skills training, STEM education, telehealth access, and other services. Trump claimed the Digital Equity Act is "racist and illegal."

Butcher said that "for all anyone knows, it was canceled simply because the word 'equity' is in it." He pointed out that the same word appears in the title of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. Given that, "the updated policy guidance for the BEAD program could have been worse," Butcher said.

Lutnick and other Republicans didn't like the Biden administration's decision to prioritize the building of fiber networks in BEAD, arguing that fixed wireless and satellite services like Starlink should have an equal shot at obtaining grants. The NTIAsaidon June 6 that states and territories must conduct "an additional 'Benefit of the Bargain Round' of subgrantee selection that permits all applicants to compete on a level playing field." That will give non-fiber ISPs a better chance to obtain grants.

Senate Democrats accused the Trump administration of forcing states to subsidize Starlink instead of more robust fiber networks.

"States must maintain the flexibility to choose the highest quality broadband options, rather than be forced by bureaucrats in Washington to funnel funds to Elon Musk's Starlink, which lacks the scalability, reliability, and speed of fiber or other terrestrial broadband solutions," Senate Democratswrotein a May 30 letter to Trump and Lutnick. The letter said that forcing states to scrap their previous work could cause them to "not only miss this year's construction season but next year's as well, delaying broadband deployment by years."

Lutnick has pushed for lower per-location costs and made asocial media postcriticizing Nevada's plans. "The Biden Administration approved their BEAD application with 24 project areas in the state with a PER LOCATION cost of over $100,000 each, incredible," Lutnick wrote. "One location cost over $228,000!! We will stop this absurd spending while delivering the benefit of the bargain by connecting unserved communities with satellite, fixed wireless, and/or fiber: whichever makes the most economic sense."

Lutnick alsocomplainedthat "Congress set aside $42.45 billion for rural broadband in November 2021. More than three years later, not a single person has been connected to the Internet under the BEAD program."

Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.)calledLutnick's complaint disingenuous. "You've been holding up BEAD funding that was already APPROVED for my state since January, and you're complaining no one has been connected yet?" she wrote.

Butcher said he trusts the expertise of Nevada's broadband office to "make the most of the available funding," even if Lutnick thinks the state is spending too much in some areas. "We are talking about facilitating a once-in-a-lifetime level of critical infrastructure investment," Butcher said. "Every place is going to be different."

Butcher said Lutnick is exercising "authority as a central government over the rights and expertise of a state body, which I guess I don't understand how the party's values work anymore, but that to me feels like a pretty strange Republican imposition."

Overall,Nevada's planwas to use $416 million to connect 43,715 households and businesses. Maine was toreceive about $272 million, which Butcher said would "provide deployment to about 25,000 unserved households and businesses" and about 3,500 community anchor institutions. Anchor institutions under the BEAD program canincludeplaces like schools, libraries, hospitals and other health facilities, public safety facilities, public housing, and community centers.

"With our available funding, we really don't have the ability to consider a cost per passing anywhere near" the $228,000 example cited by Lutnick, Butcher said. "We have to be resourceful and efficient in the decision-making… to squeeze the value out of that as much as possible."

Fiber is Butcher's first choice, and he said he is not convinced that the Trump administration's new guidelines will significantly reduce the amount of fiber deployment that ultimately happens once BEAD funds are finally spent.

"The introduction of more of a preference or bias towards the cheapest deployment option… actually may very well drive competition and further incentivize fiber providers to be more aggressive" in their bids for projects, he said.

Still, he said the cost of laying fiber lines in certain locations means that wireless and satellite networks have their place. "There are some places where fiber is a prohibitive cost. Maine is a big place without a lot of people," Butcher said.

When the government gives money to a fiber ISP to subsidize deployment, it's easy to see the results: The provider is required under the terms of the grant to install fiber at homes and businesses that weren't previously served. The benefits aren't as immediately clear with Starlink, which is already deploying satellites that can serve most of the country.

But residents can benefit from deals between Starlink and local governments by gaining access to equipment and higher levels of service. Maine alreadypartnered with Starlinklast year to coordinate bulk purchases of equipment for Internet users and guarantee service availability.

Starlink availability and speed varies by region. But with last year's deal between Maine and Starlink, "we've been able to establish a network reservation to ensure a higher standard of service performance," Butcher said. He called Starlink a great option for remote areas but said that satellite is "far from the policy standard that we should be looking to" for every location in Maine.

Despite the BEAD holdup and Digital Equity Act cancellation, the MCA has been distributing other funds. "Over the last three years, MCA has facilitated over $250 million in public and private investments to address about 86,000 unserved locations," Butcher said.

With the BEAD changes, Butcher said the MCA is ready to do the work needed to obtain the funding. "I think in the context of our DOGE environment, it's important to note that teams like the MCA team are ready to rise to the moment and to do really hard work. But this is the kind of thing that absolutely grinds people down," Butcher said. "It's not just MCA, it's this entire network of Internet service providers, their subcontractors, workforce training providers, community volunteer broadband committees. These investments are reflective of an entire ecosystem which doesn't just entail pole-in-the-ground and attaching wires to the pole and equipment to that. It is a robust set of public-private partnerships."

Google's disclaimer says AI "may include mistakes," which is an understatement.

When major events occur, most people rush to Google to find information. Increasingly, the first thing they see is an AI Overview, a feature that already has areputation for making glaring mistakes. In the wake of atragic plane crash in India, Google's AI search results are spreading misinformation claiming the incident involved an Airbus plane—it was actually a Boeing 787.

Travelers are more attuned to the airliner models these days after a spate ofcrashes involving Boeing's 737 lineupseveral years ago. Searches for airline disasters are sure to skyrocket in the coming days, with reports that more than 200 passengers and crew lost their lives in the Air India Flight 171 crash.The way generative AI operatesmeans some people searching for details may get the wrong impression from Google's results page.

Not all searches get AI answers, but Google has been steadilyexpanding this featuresince it debuted last year. One searcher on Redditspotted a troubling confabulationwhen searching for crashes involving Airbus planes. AI Overviews, apparently overwhelmed with results reporting on the Air India crash, stated confidently (and incorrectly) that it was an Airbus A330 that fell out of the sky shortly after takeoff. We've run a few similar searches—some of the AI results say Boeing, some say Airbus, and some include a strange mashup of both Airbus and Boeing. It's a mess.

But why is Google bringing up the Air India crash at all in the context of Airbus? Unfortunately, it's impossible to predict if you'll get an AI Overview that blames Boeing or Airbus—generative AI is non-deterministic, meaning the output is different every time, even for identical inputs. Our best guess for the underlying cause is that numerous articles on the Air India crash mention Airbus as Boeing's main competitor. AI Overviews is essentially summarizing these results, and the AI goes down the wrong path because it lacks the ability to understand what is true.

Google isn't hiding that its generative AI tools can make mistakes—there's a disclaimer at the bottom of every AI Overview that notes "AI answers may include mistakes." Virtually every AI product has a similar line, but it's not very prominent, and users may simply gloss over that when talking to a robot that seems very confident in its wrongness. Perhaps these warnings aren't sufficient when hallucinations remain so common.

In this case, the AI Overview error could rile up Airbus, which probably doesn't want to be mentioned at all in this context. Meanwhile, it could give a little cover to Boeing, which has suffered its fair share of reputational damage from recent issues with its aircraft.

Google tells Ars it has manually removed this response from AI Overviews. Here is the company's full statement.

"As with all Search features, we rigorously make improvements and use examples like this to update our systems. This response is no longer showing. We maintain a high quality bar with all Search features, and the accuracy rate for AI Overviews is on par with other features like Featured Snippets."

Updated 6/12 with statement from Google.

New "nsOne" board can save a dying 1990s PlayStation 1 by transplanting original chips.

Last week, electronics engineer Lorentio Brodescoannouncedthe completion of a mock-up fornsOne, reportedly the first custom PlayStation 1 motherboard created outside of Sony in the console's 30-year history. The fully functional board accepts original PlayStation 1 chips and fits directly into the original console case, marking a milestone in reverse-engineering for the classic console released in 1994.

Brodesco's motherboard isn't an emulator or FPGA-based re-creation—it's a genuine circuit board designed to work with authentic PlayStation 1 components, including the CPU, GPU, SPU, RAM, oscillators, and voltage regulators. The board represents over a year ofreverse-engineering workthat began in March 2024 when Brodesco discovered incomplete documentation while repairing a PlayStation 1.

"This isn't an emulator. It's not an FPGA. It's not a modern replica," Brodesco wrote in a Reddit post about the project. "It's a real motherboard, compatible with the original PS1 chips."

It's a desirable project for some PS1 enthusiasts because a custom motherboard could allow owners of broken consoles to revive their systems by transplanting original chips from damaged boards onto new, functional ones. With original PS1 motherboards becoming increasingly prone to failure after three decades, replacement boards could extend the lifespan of these classic consoles without resorting to emulation.

The nsOne project—short for "Not Sony's One"—uses a hybrid design based on thePU-23series motherboards found in SCPH-900X PlayStation models but reintroduces the parallel port that Sony had removed from later revisions. Brodesco upgraded the original two-layer PCB design to a four-layer board while maintaining the same form factor.

The project has attracted attention from retro gaming communities and tech outlets, with coverage fromHackaday,TimeExtension, and other publications when it was first announced. AKickstarter campaignto fund prototype production and testing has raised 5,774 euros (about $6,684)from 65 backers as of June 5, 2025.

The nsOne project joins a growing community of homebrew PlayStation 1 hardware developments. Other recent projects includePicostation, a Raspberry Pi Pico-based optical disc emulator (ODE) that allows PlayStation 1 consoles to load games from SD cards instead of physical discs. Other ODEs likeMODEandPSIOhave also become popular solutions for retrogaming collectors who play games on original hardware as optical drives age and fail.

To understand the classic console's physical architecture, Brodesco physically sanded down an original motherboard to expose its internal layers, then cross-referenced the exposed traces with component datasheets and service manuals.

"I realized that detailed documentation on the original motherboard was either incomplete or entirely unavailable," Brodesco explained in his Kickstarter campaign. This discovery launched what would become a comprehensive documentation effort, including tracing every connection on the board and creating multi-layer graphic representations of the circuitry.

Using optical scanning and manual net-by-net reverse-engineering, Brodesco recreated the PlayStation 1's schematic in modern PCB design software. This process involved creating component symbols with accurate pin mappings and identifying—or in some cases creating—the correct footprints for each proprietary component that Sony had never publicly documented.

Brodesco also identified what he calls the "minimum architecture" required to boot the console without BIOS modifications, streamlining the design process while maintaining full compatibility.

The mock-up board shown in photos validates the footprints of chips and connectors, all redrawn from scratch. According to Brodesco, a fully routed version with complete multilayer routing and final layout is already in development.

As Brodesco noted on Kickstarter, his project's goal is to "create comprehensive documentation, design files, and production-ready blueprints for manufacturing fully functional motherboards."

Beyond repairs, the documentation and design files Brodesco is creating would preserve the PlayStation 1's hardware architecture for future generations: "It's a tribute to the PS1, to retro hardware, and to the belief that one person really can build the impossible."

Apple OSes will soon transfer passkeys seamlessly and securely across platforms.

Apple this week provided a glimpse into a feature that solves one of the biggest drawbacks of passkeys, the industry-wide standard for website and app authentication that isn't susceptible to credential phishing and other attacks targeting passwords.

The import/export feature, which Appledemonstratedat this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference, will be available in the next major releases of iOS, macOS, iPadOS, and visionOS. It aims to solve one of the biggest shortcomings of passkeys as they have existed to date. Passkeys created on one operating system or credential manager are largely bound to those environments. A passkey created on a Mac, for instance, can sync easily enough with other Apple devices connected to the same iCloud account. Transferring them to a Windows device or even a dedicated credential manager installed on the same Apple device has been impossible.

That limitation has led to criticisms that passkeys are a power play by large companies to lock users into specific product ecosystems. Users have also rightly worried that the lack of transferability increases the risk of getting locked out of important accounts if a device storing passkeys is lost, stolen, or destroyed.

The FIDO Alliance, the consortium of more than 100 platform providers, app makers, and websites developing the authentication standard, has been keenly aware of the drawback and has been working on programming interfaces that will make the passkey syncing more flexible. Arecent teardownof the Google password manager by Android Authority shows that developers are actively implementing import/export tools, although the company has yet to provide any timeline for their general availability. (Earlier this year, the Google password manager added functionality to transfer passwords to iOS apps, but the process is clunky.) Arecent updatefrom FIDO shows that a large roster of companies are participating in the development, including Dashlane, 1Password, Bitwarden, Devolutions, NordPass, and Okta.

“People own their credentials and should have the flexibility to manage them where they choose,” the narrator of the Apple video says. “This gives people more control over their data and the choice of which credential manager they use.” The transfer feature, which will also work with passwords and verification codes, provides an industry-standard means for apps and OSes to more securely sync these credentials.

Credit:

Apple

This new process is fundamentally different and more secure than traditional credential export methods, which often involve exporting an unencrypted CSV or JSON file, then manually importing it into another app. The transfer process is user initiated, occurs directly between participating credential manager apps and is secured by local authentication like Face ID.

This transfer uses a data schema that was built in collaboration with the members of the FIDO Alliance. It standardizes the data format for passkeys, passwords, verification codes, and more data types.

The system provides a secure mechanism to move the data between apps. No insecure files are created on disk, eliminating the risk of credential leaks from exported files. It’s a modern, secure way to move credentials.

The push to passkeys is fueled by the tremendous costs associated with passwords. Creating and managing a sufficiently long, randomly generated password for each account is a burden on many users, a difficulty that often leads to weak choices and reused passwords. Leaked passwords have also been a chronic problem.

Passkeys, in theory, provide a means of authentication that’s immune to credential phishing, password leaks, and password spraying. Under the latest “FIDO2” specification, it creates a unique public/private encryption keypair during each website or app enrollment. The keys are generated and stored on a user’s phone, computer, YubiKey, or similar device. The public portion of the key is sent to the account service. The private key remains bound to the user device, where it can’t be extracted. During sign-in, the website or app server sends the device that created the key pair a challenge in the form of pseudo-random data. Authentication occurs only when the device signs the challenge using the corresponding private key and sends it back.

This design ensures that there is no shared secret that ever leaves the user's device. That means there's no data to be sniffed in transit, phished, or compromised through other common methods.

As Inoted in December, the biggest thing holding back passkeys at the moment is their lack of usability. Apps, OSes, and websites are, in many cases, islands that don't interoperate with their peers. Besides potentially locking users out of their accounts, the lack of interoperability also makes passkeys too difficult for many people.

Apple's demo this week provides the strongest indication yet that passkey developers are making meaningful progress in improving usability.

"I was very disappointed, especially because it was so close to confirmation."

Nearly two weeks have passed since Jared Isaacman received a fateful, brief phone call from two officials in President Trump's Office of Personnel Management. In those few seconds, the trajectory of his life over the next three and a half years changed dramatically.

The president, the callers said, wanted to go in a different direction for NASA's administrator. At the time, Isaacman was within days of a final vote on the floor of the US Senate and assured of bipartisan support. He had run the gauntlet of six months of vetting, interviews, and a committee hearing. He expected to be sworn in within a week. And then, it was all gone.

"I was very disappointed, especially because it was so close to confirmation and I think we had a good plan to implement," Isaacman told Ars on Wednesday.

Isaacman's nomination was pulled for political reasons. As SpaceX founder and one-time President Trump confidant Elon Musk made his exit from the White House, key officials who felt trampled on by Musk took their revenge. They knifed a political appointment, Isaacman, who shared Musk's passion for extending humanity's reach to Mars. The dismissal was part of a chain of events that ultimately led to a break in the relationship between Trump and Musk, igniting awar of words.

When I spoke with Isaacman this week, I didn't want to rehash the political melee. I preferred to talk about his plan. After all, he had six months to look under the hood of NASA, identify the problems that were holding the space agency back, and release its potential in this new era of spaceflight.

“It shouldn’t be a surprise, the organizational structure is very heavy with management and leadership," Isaacman said. "Lots of senior leadership with long meetings, who have their deputies, who have their chiefs of staff, who have deputy chiefs of staff and associate deputies. It is not just a NASA problem; across government, there are principal, deputy, assistant-to-the-deputy roles. It makes it very hard to have a culture of ownership and urgent decision-making."

Isaacman said his plan, a blueprint of more than 100 pages detailing various actions to modernize NASA and make it more efficient, would have started with the bureaucracy. "It was going to be hard to get the big, exciting stuff done without a reorganization, a rebuild, including cultural rebuilding, and an aggressive, hungry, mission-first culture," he said.

One of his first steps would have been to attempt to accelerate the timeline for the Artemis II mission, which is scheduled to fly four astronauts around the Moon in April 2026. He planned to bring in "strike" teams of engineers to help move Artemis and other programs forward. Isaacman wanted to see the Artemis II vehicle on the pad later this summer, with the goal of launching in December of this year, echoing the historic launch of Apollo 8 in December 1968.

Isaacman also sought to reverse thespace agency's decisionto cut utilization of the International Space Station due to budget issues.

"Instead of the current thinking, three crew members every eight months to manage the budget, I wanted to go seven crew members every four months," he said. "I was even going to pay for one of the missions, if need be, to just get more people up there, more cracks at science, and try and figure out the orbital economy, or else life will be very hard on the commercial LEO destinations."

As part of this, he would have pushed for certification of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft to carry seven astronauts—which was in the vehicle's baseline design—instead of the current four. This would have allowed NASA to fly more professional astronauts, but also payload specialists like the agency used to do during the Space Shuttle program. Essentially, NASA experts of certain experiments would fly and conduct their own research.

"I wanted to bring back the Payload Specialist program and open it up to the NASA workforce," he said. "Because things are pretty difficult right now, and I wanted to get people excited and reward the best."

He also planned to seek goodwill by donating his salary as administrator to Space Camp at the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for scholarships to inspire the next generation of explorers.

Isaacman's signature issue was going to be a full-bore push into nuclear electric propulsion, which he views as essential for the sustainable exploration of the Solar System by humans. Nuclear electric propulsion converts heat from a fission reactor to electrical power, like a power plant on Earth, and then uses this energy to produce thrust by accelerating an ionized propellant, such as xenon. Nuclear propulsion requires significantly less fuel than chemical propulsion, and it opens up more launch windows to Mars and other destinations.

"We would have gone right to a 100-kilowatt test vehicle that we would send somewhere inspiring with some great cameras," he said. "Then we are going right to megawatt class, inside of four years, something you could dock a human-rated spaceship to, or drag a telescope to a Lagrange point and then return, big stuff like that. The goal was to get America underway in space on nuclear power."

Another key element of this plan is that it would give some of NASA's field centers, including Marshall Space Flight Center, important work to do after the cancellation of the Space Launch System rocket.

"Pivoting to nuclear spaceships, in my mind, was just the right thing to do for the SLS states, even if it's not the right locations or the right people. There is a lot of dollars there that those states don’t want to let go of," he said. "When you speak to those senators, if you give them another kind of bar to grab onto, they can get excited about what comes next. And imagine an SLS-caliber budget going into building, literally, nuclear orbiters that could do all sorts of things. That’s directionally correct, right?"

What direction NASA takes now is unclear, but the loss of Isaacman is acute. The agency's acting administrator, Janet Petro, is largely taking direction from the White House Office of Management and Budget and has no independence. A confirmed administrator is now months away. The lights at the historic space agency get a little dimmer each day as a result.

As for what he plans to do now that he suddenly has time on his hands—Isaacman stepped down as chief executive of Shift4, the financial payments company he founded, to become NASA administrator—Isaacman is weighing his options.

"I'm sure a lot of supporters in the space community would love to hear me say that I’m done with politics, but I'm not sure that’s the case," he said. "I want to serve our country, give back, and make a difference. I don’t know what, but I will find something."

What his role in politics would be, Isaacman, who has described himself as a moderate, Republican-leaning voter, is unsure. However, he wants to help bridge a nation that is riven by partisan politics. "I think if you don't have more moderates and better communicators try to pull us closer together, we're just going to keep moving farther apart," he said. "And that just doesn’t seem like it's in any way good for the country."

The woman was in her 60s when dermatologists finally figured things out.

Breast cancer. Colon cancer. An enlarged thyroid gland. A family history of tumors and cancers as well. It wasn't until the woman developed an annoying case of dry mouth that doctors put it all together. By then, she was in her 60s.

According toa new case study in JAMA Dermatology, the woman presented to a dermatology clinic in Spain after three months of oral unpleasantness. They noted the cancers in her medical history. When she opened wide, doctors immediately saw the problem: Her tongue was covered in little wart-like bumps that resembled a slippery, flesh-colored cobblestone path. (Imagehere.)

Such a cobblestone tongue is a telltale sign of a rare genetic condition calledCowden syndrome. It's caused by inherited mutations that break a protein, called PTEN, leading to tumors and cancers.

PTEN, which stands for phosphatase and tensin homolog, generally helps keep cells from growing out of control. Specifically,PTEN deactivates a signaling lipid called PIP3(phosphatidylinositol 3,4,5-trisphosphate), and that deactivation blocks a signaling pathway (the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway) involved in regulating cell growth, survival, and migration. When PTEN is broken, PIP3activity ramps up, and tumors can grow unchecked.

In Cowden syndrome, PTEN mutations lead to noncancerous tumors or masses called hamartomas, which can occur in any organ. But, people with the syndrome are also at high risk of developing a slew of cancerous growths—most commonly cancers of the breast, thyroid, and uterus—over their lifetime. That's why people diagnosed with the condition are advised to undergo intensive cancer screenings, including annual ultrasounds of the thyroid starting at age 7 and annual mammograms and MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging) starting at age 30 at the latest.

For Cowden syndrome patients who aren't aware that the autosomal dominant condition runs in their family, most figure it out in their teens or 20s. Cowden syndrome typically starts with small masses on the skin or mucus membranes, often in the mouth and particularly on the tongue. About 80 percent of cases start with those skin and mucus membrane masses showing up in the second or third decade of life. However, the woman in Spain didn't seem to have problems with her tongue until she reached her 60s, which may have been why her doctors didn't diagnose her condition sooner.

Also, Cowden syndrome is rare. Researchers estimate that Cowden syndrome, first identified in the 1960s, occurs in about 1 in 200,000 people. But while the inherited condition is rare, mutations in PTEN are not rare in cancers generally. PTEN mutations can also occur sporadically, meaning they are not inherited. Overall, mutations in PTEN areamong the most common mutations in sporadic cancers. Sporadic PTEN mutations are often found driving cancers of the lung, prostate, and pancreas, as well as melanoma.

For the patient in Spain, genetic testing confirmed she had a PTEN mutation, and her Cowden syndrome diagnosis was confirmed. Unfortunately for her and other patients, there's no specific treatment for the genetic disease. Some drugs that inhibit the mTOR pathway have shown some promise, and noncancerous masses can be treated with things like surgery and laser treatments. However, the condition is managed by a team of clinicians who rigorously monitor and treat any tumors or cancers that may occur.