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- Code Network Sockets in C Building TCP clients and servers from scratch in C.
- Unix The Origins of Unix How Thompson, Ritchie, and McIlroy built the system that shaped computing.
- Homelab 10-inch Homelab Racks Planning, parts, and 3D prints for dense, quiet home infrastructure.
- Wireless Networking Linux Wireless Tools Managing 802.11 interfaces directly from the command line.
- Python Beginner's Python Start here to learn programming, from variables to command line tools.
- Retro Hardware DEC PDP-11 Architecture The minicomputer that defined C and hosted the first editions of Unix.
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Live RSSExternal headlines from independent technology and security sources.
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Drones sink ships near NATO countries in “unacceptable” attacks, EU says (opens external article)
Drones sank two cargo ships and damaged a third in the exclusive economic zones of NATO member countries for the first time, killing at least two sailors. The attacks represent a notable escalation as Black Sea commercial shipping has increasingly come under attack during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Russia also being accused of carrying out “hybrid warfare” incidents across Europe. The…
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OpenAI will watermark ChatGPT outputs by default—but only in the EU (opens external article)
OpenAI will begin automatically watermarking text generated with ChatGPT in the European Union, the company has announced. It will also offer the watermarking feature in other regions, but it will be off by default outside of the EU. The move in Europe is driven by a need to comply with the EU AI Act, which took effect in August. It requires marking content produced by AI models in a way that ano…
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HBO Max, Paramount+, and Discovery+ "will unify into a single service” (opens external article)
After months of industry and customer speculation, Paramount Skydance has shed some light on the future of the HBO Max and Paramount+ streaming services. Paramount Skydance completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) today, ending a monthslong saga that began when Netflix last year announced its own plans to buy WBD. Netflix scrapped those plans in February. Skydance is the name of…
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It looks like the Atlantic storm season may finally produce a hurricane (opens external article)
A low-pressure system in the western Gulf of Mexico should soon become a tropical storm, and based on the latest forecast modeling, it has a decent chance of becoming a hurricane. Normally, a hurricane forming in early October would not be particularly noteworthy. However, this year the development of a hurricane would be a big deal—because it has not happened yet. In the modern hurricane record—…
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Hackers obtain counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large services (opens external article)
Attackers hijacked three top-level domains and used their control to mint counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large organizations, Google said Tuesday. The attackers launched a series of attacks on the .gh, .sl, and .as country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) and then modified authoritative DNS records for selected domains within those namespaces. By controlling those DNS records, t…
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Paramount completes $111B Warner merger, creating “Skydance” behemoth (opens external article)
Paramount Skydance completed its $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery today, after a last-ditch effort to block the deal was rejected by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. The post-merger company is called Skydance, taking the name of a firm that Paramount bought in a separate deal last year. The new Skydance combines two of the largest movie studios, streaming services Paramount+ and…
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Support Ars and get a better reading experience in return (opens external article)
When Ars launched in 1998, there was one way to read it: in a web browser on a PC (or Mac). Your screen of choice was either some massive CRT or a very expensive LCD monitor (or, in my case, the less-expensive grayscale, passive-matrix LCD on a PowerBook). Either way, it was butt in chair, chair at desk. One of the first perks we offered subscribers way back at the turn of the millennium allowed…
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Amazon kills Alexa’s ability to control Echo speakers' AUX input (opens external article)
Amazon has disabled Alexa control of devices plugged into the company's Echo smart speaker’s AUX port. Users have reported receiving an email from Amazon this week informing them of the change. “This is a reminder that as of today, voice commands to control your Echo device’s Aux input are no longer available. Requests like 'Alexa, play from line in” or “Alexa, set aux input' will no longer work,…
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Neutrino physicist wins 2026 Nobel Physics Prize (opens external article)
Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” Halzen spearheaded the development and construction of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica, enabling physicists to capture high-energy neutrinos c…
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Googlebook "Better Together" phone features don't work with Samsung at launch (opens external article)
Googlebooks are Google's latest attempt to carve out a piece of the premium laptop market, and tight integration with Android phones is a key part of that effort. Now that Googlebooks are available, we're learning of some frustrating limitations of that plan. For now, Googlebooks will only play nicely with your phone if you have a Pixel. When Google announced the launch window for Googlebooks, it…
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Why is NASA bringing 7,500 contractors back to work as civil servants? (opens external article)
As a flight director during NASA's Apollo missions, Gerry Griffin led several lunar landings. He helped bring the crew of Apollo 13 safely back to Earth. Later, he directed Johnson Space Center in Houston. Through these experiences, Griffin learned the value of teamwork in spaceflight—during the dynamic moments that can make or break a successful launch or landing, you absolutely have to trust yo…
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All-electric camping gets a solar upgrade: The 2027 Pebble Flow (opens external article)
There is, I think, a pent-up demand for bringing electrification to camping. Anyone who’s had their sleep disturbed by the sound of someone else’s generator running at night would probably agree. Certainly, any time we cover an electric van, comments are filled with people wondering if and when a camper conversion might appear. Kia showed off such a concept a couple of years ago, as did Winnebago…
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Big Oil asks Supreme Court to kill climate lawsuits before trial (opens external article)
The US Supreme Court heard arguments from oil companies on Monday that could help decide the fate of more than two dozen lawsuits accusing the industry of deceiving the public about climate change. The claims seek potentially billions of dollars in damages to help pay the costs imposed by climate-related extreme weather. Yet the questions before the court did not focus on the merits of these clai…
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OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic (opens external article)
The publisher of Wikipedia said Monday that OpenAI agents attempted to hack a note-taking tool it hosts, made unauthorized edits, and sent millions of resource-intensive requests to its infrastructure, in the latest instance of OpenAI systems taking harmful and potentially dangerous actions. The objective of some of the OpenAI agents’ actions, the Wikimedia Foundation said, was to use Wikipedia a…
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Licensing costs driving 90 percent of VMware users to explore options: Survey (opens external article)
VMware customers face multiple obstacles as they rethink their virtualization strategy to reduce dependence on VMware. Today, Rimini Street published its “2026 IT Virtualization Survey – What’s Next for VMware Users.” The survey examined 300 organizations worldwide that use VMware. Notably, Rimini sells third-party support for VMware and other software, including Oracle and SAP. That means there’…
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MCP for agent-to-agent comms may be the riskiest protocol you've never heard of (opens external article)
The adoption of AI agents in millions of organizations is creating new opportunities for attackers to make them take malicious actions, such as exfiltrating database contents and sensitive business and personal information. In the past five months, Google and four other organizations—with little in common except for their use of AI agents—have acknowledged vulnerabilities that exploit one agent i…
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Cable lobby to sue Trump FCC over repeal of national TV ownership cap (opens external article)
Cable lobby groups notified the Federal Communications Commission that they will sue the agency to block its controversial repeal of the National Television Ownership Rule, which limits the number of broadcast TV stations a single company may own. The cable groups said that larger broadcast TV station groups will have leverage to demand higher retransmission fees from TV providers, resulting in "…
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Texas city demands $2M for public records on Flock usage (opens external article)
As bipartisan backlash against Flock grows, some cities are asking anti-surveillance advocates and media outlets to pay eye-popping fees—including charging tens of thousands or even millions—to get information about how police departments are using and potentially abusing AI-enabled camera systems that track every vehicle that passes them. On Monday, the Texas Tribune reported that city officials…
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Command-line tool quickly removes Apple Intelligence from macOS 27 (opens external article)
A new tool is allowing Mac users the ability again to easily turn off Apple Intelligence with one click and free up to 12GB of storage. Unlike with previous versions of macOS, macOS 27 Golden Gate doesn’t have a toggle for turning off Apple Intelligence. That makes disabling AI features that you may not want more difficult. It also means that the AI models necessary for running Apple Intelligence…
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Controlling the brain with light earns a physiology Nobel (opens external article)
Over decades of research, scientists have built up a partial picture of what specialized cells within the brain and spinal cord do. By studying how the brain develops, they could identify genes that were active in different populations of neurons and where in the brain those neurons resided. In some cases, these genes could then be used to genetically delete the neurons, allowing us to get some i…