Rejus Almole – Page 26

You should care more about the stabilizers in your mechanical keyboard—here’s why

Features, Tech / Rejus Almole / September 27, 2025

While most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the keys they tap all day, mechanical keyboard enthusiasts certainly do. As interest in DIY keyboards expands, there are plenty of things to obsess over, such as keycap sets, layout, knobs, and switches. But you have to get deep into the hobby before you realize there’s something more important than all that: the stabilizers.

Even if you have the fanciest switches and a monolithic aluminum case, bad stabilizers can make a keyboard feel and sound like garbage. Luckily, there’s a growing ecosystem of weirdly fancy stabilizers that can upgrade your typing experience, packing an impressive amount of innovation into a few tiny bits of plastic and metal.

What is a stabilizer, and why should you care?

Most keys on a keyboard are small enough that they go up and down evenly, no matter where you press. That’s not the case for longer keys: Space, Enter, Shift, Backspace, and, depending on the layout, a couple more on the number pad. These keys have wire assemblies underneath called stabilizers, which help them go up and down when the switch does.

A cheap stabilizer will do this, but it won’t necessarily do it well. Stabilizers can be loud and move unevenly, or a wire can even pop out and really ruin your day. But what’s good? A stabilizer is there to, well, stabilize, and that’s all it should do. It facilitates smooth up and down movement of frequently used keys—if stabilizers add noise, friction, or wobble, they’re not doing their job and are, therefore, bad. Most keyboards have bad stabilizers.

Stabilizers assembled — Stabilizer stems poke up through the plate to connect to your keycaps. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

Like switches, most stabilizers are based on the old-school Cherry Inc. designs, but the specifics have morphed in recent years. Stabilizers have to adhere to certain physical measurements to properly mount on PCBs and connect to standard keycaps. However, designers have come up with a plethora of creative ways to modify and improve stabilizers within that envelope. And yes, premium stabilizers really are better.

You should care more about the stabilizers in your mechanical keyboard—here’s why Read More »

Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA”

bytedance, china, Donald Trump, national security, Policy, tiktok, us-china trade war / Rejus Almole / September 26, 2025

Previously, experts had suggested that China had little incentive to follow through with the deal, while as recently as July, ByteDance denied reports that it agreed to sell TikTok to the US, the South China Morning Post reported. Yesterday, Reuters noted that Vice President JD Vance confirmed that the “new US company will be valued at around $14 billion,” a price tag “far below some analyst estimates,” which might frustrate ByteDance. Questions also remain over what potential concessions Trump may have made to get Xi’s sign-off.

It’s also unclear if Trump’s deal meets the legal requirements of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, with Reuters reporting that “numerous details” still need to be “fleshed out.” Last Friday, James Sullivan of JP Morgan suggested on CNBC that “Trump’s proposed TikTok deal lacked clarity on who is in control of the algorithm, leaving the national security concerns wide open,” CNBC reported.

Other critics, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s civil liberties director David Greene, warned in a statement to Ars that the US now risks “turning over” TikTok “to the allies of a President who seems to have no respect for the First Amendment.”

Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute, agreed. “The arrangement creates uncertainty about what influence or oversight the US government might require over this separate algorithm that could raise potential First Amendment concerns regarding government influence over a private actor,” Huddleston said.

Will TikTok become right-wing?

The Guardian recently conducted a deep dive into how the Murdochs’ and Ellisons’ involvement could “gift Trump’s billionaire allies a degree of control over US media that would be vast and unprecedented” by allowing “the owners of the US’s most powerful cable TV channels” to “steer the nation’s most influential social network.”

Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA” Read More »

$scientists-want-to-treat-complex-bone-fractures-with-a-bone-healing-gun$

Scientists want to treat complex bone fractures with a bone-healing gun

3D printing, Biology, bone, fractures, medicine, Science / Rejus Almole / September 26, 2025

After examining a few candidate formulations, the team found the right material. “We used a biocompatible thermoplastic called polycaprolactone and hydroxyapatite as base materials,” Lee said. Polycaprolactone was chosen because it is an FDA-approved material that degrades in the body within a few months after implantation. The hydroxyapatite, on the other hand, supports bone-tissue regeneration. Lee’s team experimented with various proportions of these two ingredients and finally nailed the formulation that checked all the boxes: It extruded at a relatively harmless 60° Celsius, the mix was mechanically sound, it adhered to the bone well, and it degraded over time.

Once the bone-healing bullets were ready, the team tested them on rabbits. Rabbits with broken femurs treated with Lee’s healing gun recovered faster than those treated with bone cement, which is the closest commercially available alternative. But there is still a lot to do before the healing gun can be tested on humans.

Skill issues

While the experiment on rabbits revealed new bone tissues forming around the implants created with the healing gun, their slow degradation of the implanted material prevented the full restoration of bone tissues. Another improvement Lee plans involves adding antibiotics to the formulation. The implant, he said, will release the drugs over time to prevent infections.

Then there’s the issue of load bearing. Rabbits are fine as test subjects, but they are rather light. “To evaluate the potential to use this technology on humans, we need to look into its long-term safety in large animal models,” Lee said.

Beyond the questions about the material, the level of skill required to operate this healing gun seems rather high.

Extrusion-based 3D printers, the ones that work more or less like very advanced hot glue guns, usually use guiding rods or rails for precise printing head positioning. If those rods or rails are warped, even slightly, the accuracy of your prints will most likely suffer. Achieving comparable precision with a handheld device might be a bit difficult, even for a skilled surgeon. “It is true that the system requires practice,” Lee said. “We may need to integrate it with a guiding mechanism that would position the head of the device precisely. This could be our next-gen bone printing device.”

Device, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.device.2025.100873

Scientists want to treat complex bone fractures with a bone-healing gun Read More »

Study: Planned budget cuts would hurt drug development badly

drugs, grants, NIH, patents, Science, science funding / Rejus Almole / September 25, 2025

It turns out that nearly 60 percent of the patents cite NIH-funded research. And here, the at-risk grants put in a very good showing, with just over half of the patents citing at least one at-risk grant. Note that many grants will have citations from both categories; to get a better sense, the researchers looked for patents where at least a quarter of the papers cited arose from NIH-funded research. For any grant, that number was a bit over 35 percent; for at-risk grants, it was about 12 percent.

Looking at specific examples, the researchers found that some of the approved drugs that relied on at-risk research were used for cancer treatments and genetic disorders. In other words, treatments that are likely to have a significant impact on public health. There are a couple of reasons to think that this is an underestimation of the impact, as well. To begin with, their source data on funding priorities stops at 2007, leaving a roughly 15-year gap where research funding can’t be analyzed, but patents are still being filed.

In addition, drugs are just a small part of the potential impact of NIH research. “We excluded a wide range of important medical advances that may also build on NIH-funded research,” the researchers acknowledge. “These include vaccines, gene and cell therapies, and other biologic drugs; diagnostic technologies and medical devices; as well as innovations in medical procedures, patient care practices, and surgical techniques.” Beyond the obvious implications for public health, these sorts of patents can result in lots of economic activity, including the launching of entirely new businesses.

Beyond informing current debates about science funding, the research makes a larger point about scientific progress. We tend to focus on the major leaps forward and the high-profile scientists that drive them, as the upcoming Nobel Prizes highlight. But the reality is that most advances, especially in biology, are built on a broad intellectual foundation of lower-profile work that may require years for someone to find a way to apply it to anything patentable. Broad cuts like these may mean that the scientific superstars will still walk away with grants, while leaving a field devastated by having parts of this foundation knocked out from under it.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.aeb1564 (About DOIs).

Study: Planned budget cuts would hurt drug development badly Read More »

Amazon blamed AI for layoffs, then hired cheap H1-B workers, senators allege

Amazon, Apple, Google, H-1B visas, Meta, microsoft, Policy / Rejus Almole / September 25, 2025

Tech firms pressed to explain if H-1B workers are paid less than US workers.

Senators are demanding answers from Big Tech companies accused of “filing thousands of H-1B skilled labor visa petitions after conducting mass layoffs of American employees.”

In letters sent to Amazon, Meta, Apple, Google, and Microsoft—among some of the largest sponsors of H-1B visas—Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) requested “information and data from each company regarding their recruitment and hiring practices, as well as any variation in salary and benefits between H-1B visa holders and American employees.”

The letters came shortly after Grassley sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem requesting that DHS stop “issuing work authorizations to student visa holders.” According to Grassley, “foreign student work authorizations put America at risk of technological and corporate espionage,” in addition to allegedly “contributing to rising unemployment rates among college-educated Americans.”

If DHS refuses to stop authorizing the visas, Grassley requested a “detailed explanation of what legal authority DHS is relying on to issue these authorizations.” He suggested that the authorization violates a law intended to ensure that only highly skilled workers and top talents that can’t be found in the US are granted visas.

In the letters to tech firms, senators emphasized that the unemployment rate in America’s tech sector is “well above” the overall jobless rate.

Amazon perhaps faces the most scrutiny. US Citizenship and Immigration Services data showed that Amazon sponsored the most H-1B visas in 2024 at 14,000, compared to other criticized firms like Microsoft and Meta, which each sponsored 5,000, The Wall Street Journal reported. Senators alleged that Amazon blamed layoffs of “tens of thousands” on the “adoption of generative AI tools,” then hired more than 10,000 foreign H-1B employees in 2025.

The letter similarly called out Meta for its “year of efficiency,” laying off “a quarter of its workforce” between 2022 and 2023. Meta followed that with more layoffs impacting 3,500 employees in 2025, Senators noted, while receiving approval to hire more than 5,000 H-1B employees.

Senators also pushed Google to explain why it “laid off tens-of-thousands of employees in recent years” despite “enjoying record profits.”

“With all of the homegrown American talent relegated to the sidelines, we find it hard to believe that [you] cannot find qualified American tech workers to fill these positions,” senators scolded tech firms, demanding responses by October 10.

That’s the same deadline that Grassley gave Noem to respond about stopping student visa authorizations. If Noem agrees, that would likely also include cutting off “a pathway for students to work in the US for around 12 to 36 months immediately after completing their degree,” Hindustan Times reported, noting that students from India were likely to be most harmed by the proposed change.

Asked for comment on whether Noem would meet the deadline, DHS told Ars that “Congressional correspondence will be handled through official channels.”

Ars reached out to tech firms, but only Microsoft immediately responded, declining to comment.

Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee spooks startups

On X, Grassley noted that the recent pressure campaign revives an effort to change H-1B visa approval processes that he and Durbin have worked to oppose since 2023.

Back then, the senators introduced the H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act, alleging that “for years” companies have “used legal loopholes to displace qualified American workers and replace them with foreign workers who are paid subpar wages and put in exploitative working conditions.”

That legislation sought to “put an end” to “abuses” by placing new wage requirements on employers and new education requirements, only approving visas for specialty occupations that required “a bachelor’s degree or higher.” If passed, employers risked fines for violating wage requirements.

But despite having bipartisan support and a stamp of approval from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who has long argued H-1B visas “replace American” workers “with cheaper international workers,” The Guardian noted—the bill died after being referred to the Committee on the Judiciary.

Now the White House is forcing changes after Donald Trump issued an executive order last week requiring all companies sponsoring new H-1B employees to pay a $100,000 fee to bring them into the US, which started Sunday.

Trump claimed the fee was necessary to stop the H-1B nonimmigrant visa program from being “deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.”

To support this, the order cited data showing that the number of “foreign STEM workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million, while overall STEM employment has only increased 44.5 percent during that time.”

Attacking the tech sector in particular, the order also noted that “the share of IT workers in the H-1B program grew from 32 percent” in 2003 to “an average of over 65 percent” in the last five years. According to Trump, tech firms are incentivized to “close their IT divisions, fire their American staff, and outsource IT jobs to lower-paid foreign workers,” due to “artificially lower labor costs” the H-1B program supposedly creates.

“American IT workers have reported they were forced to train the foreign workers who were taking their jobs and to sign nondisclosure agreements about this indignity as a condition of receiving any form of severance,” Trump’s order said. “This suggests H-1B visas are not being used to fill occupational shortages or obtain highly skilled workers who are unavailable in the United States.”

By imposing the $100,000 fee, Trump claims that companies will be forced to use the H-1B program the way “it was intended”—motivated to pay more for certain foreign workers in order “to fill jobs for which highly skilled and educated American workers are unavailable.” Speaking last Friday, Trump suggested that money collected from the fees would be used to “reduce taxes” and “reduce debt,” The Guardian reported.

The order also proposed a new weighted lottery system, where applications for visas for jobs with the highest wages would be more likely to be approved than lower-wage jobs. For some firms, changes to the system may feel personal, as The Guardian noted that Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai and Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella “were at one point H-1B visa holders.”

Most tech companies haven’t commented directly on the order, with Netflix founder Reed Hastings standing out among the few voicing support for the change, while other firms internally warned workers to limit travel until companies understood how the process could impact existing H-1B employees. Since then, the White House has confirmed that only new applicants will be impacted by the changes.

Previously, tech firms only had to pay somewhere between $1,700 to $4,500, “depending on whether the visa was expedited,” The Guardian reported. Now facing a much larger fee to hire foreign talent, smaller tech firms have complained that Trump’s policy advantages Big Tech firms with deeper pockets, The New York Times reported. The fee may also deter companies from coming into the US, the Times reported.

Some believe that Trump’s policy is short-sighted, with startups particularly panicked. While Big Tech firms can afford to pay the fees, the US risks falling behind in innovation and tech leadership, critics told the Times, as “Silicon Valley relies on a steady stream of start-ups to advance new ideas and technologies.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Amazon blamed AI for layoffs, then hired cheap H1-B workers, senators allege Read More »

Apple iPhone 17 review: Sometimes boring is best

Apple, Features, iphone 17, iphone 17 pro, iphone air, Tech / Rejus Almole / September 25, 2025

let’s not confuse “more interesting” with “better”

The least exciting iPhone this year is also the best value for the money.

The iPhone 17 Pro isn’t flashy but it’s probably the best of this year’s upgrades. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple seems determined to leave a persistent gap between the cameras of its Pro iPhones and the regular ones, but most other features—the edge-to-edge-screen design with FaceID, the Dynamic Island, OLED display panels, Apple Intelligence compatibility—eventually trickle down to the regular-old iPhone after a generation or two of timed exclusivity.

One feature that Apple has been particularly slow to move down the chain is ProMotion, the branding the company uses to refer to a screen that can refresh up to 120 times per second rather than the more typical 60 times per second. ProMotion isn’t a necessary feature, but since Apple added it to the iPhone 13 Pro in 2021, the extra fluidity and smoothness, plus the always-on display feature, have been big selling points for the Pro phones.

This year, ProMotion finally comes to the regular-old iPhone 17, years after midrange and even lower-end Android phones made the swap to 90 or 120 Hz display panels. And it sounds like a small thing, but the screen upgrade—together with a doubling of base storage from 128GB to 256GB—makes the gap between this year’s iPhone and iPhone Pro feel narrower than it’s been in a long time. If you jumped on the Pro train a few years back and don’t want to spend that much again, this might be a good year to switch back. If you’ve ever been tempted by the Pro but never made the upgrade, you can continue not doing that and miss out on relatively little.

The iPhone 17 has very little that we haven’t seen in an iPhone before, compared to the redesigned Pro or the all-new Air. But it’s this year’s best upgrade, and it’s not particularly close.

You’ve seen this one before

Externally, the iPhone 17 is near-identical to the iPhone 16, which itself used the same basic design Apple had been using since the iPhone 12. The most significant update in that five-year span was probably the iPhone 15, which switched from the display notch to the Dynamic Island and from the Lightning port to USB-C.

The iPhone 12 generation was also probably the last time the regular iPhone and the Pro were this similar. Those phones used the same basic design, the same basic chip, and the same basic screen, leaving mostly camera-related improvements and the Max model as the main points of differentiation. That’s all broadly true of the split between the iPhone 17 and the 17 Pro, as well.

The iPhone Air and Pro both depart from the last half-decade of iPhone designs in different ways, but the iPhone 17 sticks with the tried-and-true. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone 17’s design has changed just enough since last year that you’ll need to find a new iPhone 17-compatible case and screen protector for your phone rather than buying something that fits a previous-generation model (it’s imperceptibly taller than the iPhone 16). The screen size has been increased from 6.1 inches to 6.3, the same as the iPhone Pro. But the aluminum-framed-glass-sandwich design is much less of a departure from recent precedent than either the iPhone Air or the Pro.

The screen is the real star of the show in the iPhone 17, bringing 120 Hz ProMotion technology and the Pro’s always-on display feature to the regular iPhone for the first time. According to Apple’s spec sheets (and my eyes, admittedly not a scientific measurement), the 17 and the Pro appear to be using identical display panels, with the same functionally infinite contrast, resolution (2622 x 1206), and brightness specs (1,000 nits typical, 1,600 nits for HDR, 3,000 nits peak in outdoor light).

It’s easy to think of the basic iPhone as “the cheap one” because it is the least expensive of the four new phones Apple puts out every year, but $799 is still well into premium-phone range, and even middle-of-the-road phones from the likes of Google and Samsung have been shipping high-refresh-rate OLED panels in cheaper phones than this for a few years now. By that metric, it’s faintly ridiculous that Apple isn’t shipping something like this in its $600 iPhone 16e, but in Apple’s ecosystem, we’ll take it as a win that the iPhone 17 doesn’t cost more than the 16 did last year.

Holding an iPhone 17 feels like holding any other regular-sized iPhone made within the last five years, with the exceptions of the new iPhone Air and some of the heavier iPhone Pros. It doesn’t have the exceptionally good screen-size-to-weight ratio or the slim profile of the Air, and it doesn’t have the added bulk or huge camera plateau of the iPhone 17 Pro. It feels about like it looks: unremarkable.

Camera

iPhone 15 Pro, main lens, 1x mode, outdoor light. If you’re just shooting with the main lens, the Air and iPhone 17 win out in color and detail thanks to a newer sensor and ISP. Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone Air’s single camera has the same specs and uses the same sensor as the iPhone 17’s main camera, so we’ve already written a bit about how well it does relative to the iPhone Pro and to an iPhone 15 Pro from a couple of years ago.

Like the last few iPhone generations, the iPhone 17’s main camera uses a 48 MP sensor that saves 24 MP images, using a process called “pixel binning” to decide which pixels are saved and which are discarded when shrinking the images down. To enable an “optical quality” 2x telephoto mode, Apple crops a 12 MP image out of the center of that sensor without doing any resizing or pixel binning. The results are a small step down in quality from the regular 1x mode, but they’re still native resolution images with no digital zoom, and the 2x mode on the iPhone Air or iPhone 17 can actually capture fine detail better than an older iPhone Pro in situations where you’re shooting an object that’s close by and the actual telephoto lens isn’t used.

The iPhone 15 Pro. When you shoot a nearby subject in 2x or even 3x mode, the Pro phones give you a crop of the main sensor rather than switching to the telephoto lens. You need to be farther from your subject for the phone to engage the telephoto lens. Andrew Cunningham

One improvement to the iPhone 17’s camera sensor this year is that the ultrawide camera is also upgraded to a 48 MP sensor so that it can benefit from the same shrinking-and-pixel-binning strategy Apple uses for the main camera. In the iPhone 16, this secondary sensor was still just 12 MP.

Compared to the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 we have here, wide shots on the iPhone 17 benefit mainly from the added detail you capture in higher-resolution 24- or 48-MP images. The difference is slightly more noticeable with details in the background of an image than with details in the foreground, as visible in the Lego castle surrounding Lego Mario.

The older the phone you’re using is, the more you’ll benefit from sensor and image signal processing improvements. Bits of dust and battle damage on Mario are most distinct on the iPhone 17 than the iPhone 15 Pro, for example, but aside from the resolution, I don’t notice much of a difference between the iPhone 16 and 17.

A true telephoto lens is probably the biggest feature the iPhone 17 Pro has going for it relative to the basic iPhone 17, and Apple has amped it up with its own 48 MP sensor this year. We’ll reuse the 4x and 8x photos from our iPhone Air review to show you what you’re missing—the telephoto camera captures considerably more fine detail on faraway objects, but even as someone who uses the telephoto on the iPhone 15 Pro constantly, I would have to think pretty hard about whether that camera is worth $300, even once you add in the larger battery, ProRAW support, and other things Apple still holds back for the Pro phones.

Specs and speeds and battery

Our iPhone Air review showed that the main difference between the iPhone 17’s Apple A19 chip and the A19 Pro used in the iPhone Air and iPhone Pro is RAM. The iPhone 17 sticks with 8GB of memory, whereas both Air and Pro are bumped up to 12GB.

There are other things that the A19 Pro can enable, including ProRes video support and 10Gbps USB 3 file transfer speeds. But many of those iPhone Pro features, including the sixth GPU core, are mostly switched off for the iPhone Air, suggesting that we could actually be looking at the exact same silicon with a different amount of RAM packaged on top.

Regardless, 8GB of RAM is currently the floor for Apple Intelligence, so there’s no difference in features between the iPhone 17 and the Air or the 17 Pro. Browser tabs and apps may be ejected from memory slightly less frequently, and the 12GB phones may age better as the years wear on. But right now, 8GB of memory puts you above the amount that most iOS 26-compatible phones are using—Apple is still optimizing for plenty of phones with 6GB, 4GB, or even 3GB of memory. 8GB should be more than enough for the foreseeable future, and I noticed zero differences in day-to-day performance between the iPhone 17 and the iPhone Air.

All phones were tested with Adaptive Power turned off.

The iPhone 17 is often actually faster than the iPhone Air, despite both phones using five-core A19-class GPUs. Apple’s thinnest phone has less room to dissipate heat, which leads to more aggressive thermal throttling, especially for 3D apps like games. The iPhone 17 will often outperform Apple’s $999 phone, despite costing $200 less.

All of this also ignores one of the iPhone 17’s best internal upgrades: a bump from 128GB of storage to 256GB of storage at the same $799 starting price as the iPhone 16. Apple’s obnoxious $100-or-$200-per-tier upgrade pricing for storage and RAM is usually the worst part about any of its products, so any upgrade that eliminates that upcharge for anyone is worth calling out.

On the battery front, we didn’t run specific tests, but the iPhone 17 did reliably make it from my typical 7: 30 or 7: 45 am wakeup to my typical 1: 00 or 1: 30 am bedtime with 15 or 20 percent left over. Even a day with Personal Hotspot use and a few dips into Pokémon Go didn’t push the battery hard enough to require a midday top-up. (Like the other new iPhones this year, the iPhone 17 ships with Adaptive Power enabled, which can selectively reduce performance or dim the screen and automatically enables Low Power Mode at 20 percent, all in the name of stretching the battery out a bit and preventing rapid drops.)

Better battery life out of the box is already a good thing, but it also means more wiggle room for the battery to lose capacity over time without seriously inconveniencing you. This is a line that the iPhone Air can’t quite cross, and it will become more and more relevant as your phone approaches two or three years in service.

The one to beat

Apple’s iPhone 17. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The screen is one of the iPhone Pro’s best features, and the iPhone 17 gets it this year. That plus the 256GB storage bump is pretty much all you need to know; this will be a more noticeable upgrade for anyone with, say, the iPhones 12-to-14 than the iPhone 15 or 16 was. And for $799—$200 more than the 128GB version of the iPhone 16e and $100 more than the 128GB version of the iPhone 16—it’s by far the iPhone lineup’s best value for money right now.

This is also happening at the same time as the iPhone Pro is getting a much chonkier new design, one I don’t particularly love the look of, even though I appreciate the functional camera and battery upgrades it enables. This year’s Pro feels like a phone targeted toward people who are actually using it in a professional photography or videography context, where in other years, it’s felt more like “the regular iPhone plus a bunch of nice, broadly appealing quality-of-life stuff that may or may not trickle down to the regular iPhone over time.”

In this year’s lineup, you get the iPhone Air, which seems to be trying to do something new at the expense of basics like camera quality and battery life. You get the iPhone 17 Pro, which feels like it was specifically built for anyone who looks at the iPhone Air and thinks, “I just want a phone with a bigger battery and a better camera, and I don’t care what it looks like or how light it is” (hello, median Ars Technica readers and employees). And the iPhone 17 is there quietly undercutting them both, as if to say, “Would anyone just like a really good version of the regular iPhone?”

Next and last on our iPhone review list this year: the iPhone 17 Pro. Maybe spending a few days up close with it will help me appreciate the design more?

The good

The exact same screen as this year’s iPhone Pro for $300 less, including 120 Hz ProMotion, variable refresh rates, and an always-on screen.
Same good main camera as the iPhone Air, plus the added flexibility of an improved wide-angle camera.
Good battery life.
A19 is often faster than iPhone Air’s A19 Pro thanks to better heat dissipation.
Jumps from 128GB to 256GB of storage without increasing the starting price.

The bad

8GB of RAM instead of 12GB. 8GB is fine, but more is also good!
I slightly prefer last year’s versions of most of these color options.
No two-column layout for apps in landscape mode.
The telephoto lens seems like it will be restricted to the iPhone Pro forever.

The ugly

People probably won’t be able to tell you have a new iPhone?

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

Apple iPhone 17 review: Sometimes boring is best Read More »

Supermicro server motherboards can be infected with unremovable malware

baseboard management controllers, Biz & IT, bms, exploits, Security, supermicro / Rejus Almole / September 24, 2025

Servers running on motherboards sold by Supermicro contain high-severity vulnerabilities that can allow hackers to remotely install malicious firmware that runs even before the operating system, making infections impossible to detect or remove without unusual protections in place.

One of the two vulnerabilities is the result of an incomplete patch Supermicro released in January, said Alex Matrosov, founder and CEO of Binarly, the security firm that discovered it. He said that the insufficient fix was meant to patch CVE-2024-10237, a high-severity vulnerability that enabled attackers to reflash firmware that runs while a machine is booting. Binarly discovered a second critical vulnerability that allows the same sort of attack.

“Unprecedented persistence”

Such vulnerabilities can be exploited to install firmware similar to ILObleed, an implant discovered in 2021 that infected HP Enterprise servers with wiper firmware that permanently destroyed data stored on hard drives. Even after administrators reinstalled the operating system, swapped out hard drives, or took other common disinfection steps, ILObleed would remain intact and reactivate the disk-wiping attack. The exploit the attackers used in that campaign had been patched by HP four years earlier but wasn’t installed in the compromised devices.

“Both issues provide unprecedented persistence power across significant Supermicro device fleets including [in] AI data centers,” Matrasov wrote to Ars in an online interview, referring to the two latest vulnerabilities Binarly discovered. “After they patched [the earlier vulnerability], we looked at the rest of the attack surface and found even worse security problems.”

The two new vulnerabilities—tracked as CVE-2025-7937 and CVE-2025-6198—reside inside silicon soldered onto Supermicro motherboards that run servers inside data centers. Baseboard management controllers (BMCs) allow administrators to remotely perform tasks such as installing updates, monitoring hardware temperatures, and setting fan speeds accordingly. BMCs also enable some of the most sensitive operations, such as reflashing the firmware for the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) that’s responsible for loading the server OS when booting. BMCs provide these capabilities and more, even when the servers they’re connected to are turned off.

Supermicro server motherboards can be infected with unremovable malware Read More »

Scientists catch a shark threesome on camera

animal behavior, aquatic animals, Biology, marine biology, mating, Science, sharks / Rejus Almole / September 23, 2025

Three sharks, two cameras

Three leopard sharks mating - near surface — Moving the action closer to the surface. Credit: Hugo Lassauce/UniSC-Aquarium des Lagons

Lassauce had two GoPro Hero 5 cameras ready at hand, albeit with questionable battery life. That’s why the video footage has two interruptions to the action: once when he had to switch cameras after getting a “low battery” signal, and a second time when he voluntarily stopped filming to conserve the second camera’s battery. Not much happened for 55 minutes, after all, and he wanted to be sure to capture the pivotal moments in the sequence. Lassauce succeeded and was rewarded with triumphant cheers from his fellow marine biologists on the boat, who knew full well the rarity of what had just been documented for posterity.

The lengthy pre-copulation stage involved all three sharks motionless on the seafloor for nearly an hour, after which the female started swimming with one male shark biting onto each of her pectoral fins. A few minutes later, the first male made his move, “penetrating the female’s cloaca with his left clasper.” Claspers are modified pelvic fins capable of transferring sperm. After the first male shark finished, he lay motionless while the second male held onto the female’s other fin. Then the other shark moved in, did his business, went motionless, and the female shark swam away. The males also swam away soon afterward.

Apart from the scientific first, documenting the sequence is a good indicator that this particular area is a critical mating habitat for leopard sharks, and could lead to better conservation strategies, as well as artificial insemination efforts to “rewild” leopard sharks in Australia and several other countries. “It’s surprising and fascinating that two males were involved sequentially on this occasion,” said co-author Christine Dudgeon, also of UniSC, adding, “From a genetic diversity perspective, we want to find out how many fathers contribute to the batches of eggs laid each year by females.”

Journal of Ethology, 2025. DOI: 10.1007/s10164-025-00866-4 (About DOIs).

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Baby Steps is the most gloriously frustrating game I’ve ever struggled through

baby steps, bennet foddy, devolver digital, gaming, hike, hill, mountain, qwop, walking, walking simulator / Rejus Almole / September 23, 2025

A real “walking simulator”

QWOP meets Death Stranding meets Getting Over It to form wonderfully surreal, unique game.

Watch out for that first step, it’s a doozy! Credit: Devolver Digital

There’s an old saying that life is not about how many times you fall down but how many times you get back up. In my roughly 13 hours of walking through the surreal mountain wilderness of Baby Steps, I’d conservatively estimate I easily fell down 1,000 times.

If so, I got up 1,001 times, which is the entire point.

When I say “fell down” here, I’m not being metaphorical. In Baby Steps, the only real antagonist is terrain that threatens to send your pudgy, middle-aged, long-underwear-clad avatar tumbling to the ground (or down a cliff) like a rag doll after the slightest misstep. You pilot this avatar using an intentionally touchy and cumbersome control system where each individual leg is tied a shoulder trigger on your controller.

Unlike the majority of 3D games, where you simply tilt the control stick and watch your character dutifully run, each step here means manually lifting one foot, leaning carefully in the direction you want to go, and then putting that foot down in a spot that maintains your overall balance. It’s like a slightly more forgiving version of the popular ’00s Flash game QWOP (which was also made by Baby Steps co-developer Bennett Foddy), except instead of sprinting on a 2D track, you take your time carefully planning each footfall on a methodical 3D hike.

Keep wiggling that foot until you find a safe place to put it. Credit: Devolver Digital

At first, you’ll stumble like a drunken toddler, mashing the shoulder buttons and tilting the control stick wildly just to inch forward. After a bit of trial and error, though, you’ll work yourself into a gentle rhythm—press the trigger, tilt the controller, let go while recentering the controller, press the other trigger, repeat thousands of times. You never quite break into a run, but you can fall into a zen pattern of marching methodically forward, like a Death Stranding courier who has to actually focus on each and every step.

As you make your halting progress up the mountain, you’ll infrequently stumble on other hikers who seem to lord their comfort and facility with the terrain over you in manic, surreal, and often hilarious cut scenes. I don’t want to even lightly spoil any of the truly gonzo moments in this extremely self-aware meta-narrative, but I will say that I found your character’s grand arc through the game to be surprisingly touching, often in some extremely subtle ways.

Does this game hate me?

Just as you feel like you’re finally getting the hang of basic hiking, Baby Steps starts ramping up the terrain difficulty in a way that can feel downright trolly at time. Gentle paths of packed dirt and rock start to be replaced with narrow planks and rickety wooden bridges spanning terrifying gaps. Gentle undulating hills are replaced with sheer cliff faces that you sidle up and across with the tiniest of toe holds to precariously balance on. Firm surfaces are slowly replaced with slippery mud, sand, snow, and ice that force you to alter your rhythm and tread extremely lightly just to make incremental progress.

Grabbing that fetching hat means risking an *extremely* punishing fall.

And any hard-earned progress can feel incredibly fragile in Baby Steps. Literally one false step can send you sliding down a hill or tumbling down a cliff face in a way that sets you back anywhere from mere minutes to sizable chunks of an hour. There’s no “reset from checkpoint” menu option or save scumming that can limit the damage, either. When you fall in Baby Steps, it can be a very long way down.

This extremely punishing structure won’t be a surprise to anyone who has played Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, where a single mistake can send you all the way back to the beginning of the game. Baby Steps doesn’t go quite that hard, giving players occasional major checkpoints and large, flat plains that prevent you from falling back too far. Still, this is a game that is more than happy to force you to pay for even small mistakes with huge portions of your only truly irreplaceable resource: time.

On more than one occasion during my playthrough, I audibly cursed at my monitor and quit the game in a huff rather than facing the prospect of spending 10 minutes retracing my steps after a particularly damaging fall. Invariably, though, I’d come back a bit later, more determined than ever to learn from my mistakes, which I usually did quickly with the benefits of time and calm nerves on my side.

It’s frequently not entirely clear where you’re supposed to go in *Baby Steps*. Credit: Devolver Digital

Baby Steps is also a game that’s happy to let you wander aimlessly. There’s no in-game map to consult, and any paths and landmarks that could point you in the “intended” way up the mountain are often intentionally confusing or obscured. It can be extremely unclear which parts of the terrain are meant to be impossibly steep and which are merely designed as difficult but plausible shortcuts that simply require pinpoint timing and foot placement. But the terrain is also designed so that almost every near-impossible barrier can be avoided altogether if you’re patient and observant enough to find a way around it.

And if you wander even slightly off the lightly beaten path, you’ll stumble on many intricately designed and completely optional points of interest, from imposing architectural towers to foreboding natural outcroppings to a miniature city made of boxes. There’s no explicit in-game reward for almost all of these random digressions, and your fellow cut-scene hikers will frequently explicitly warn you that there’s no point in climbing some structure or another. Your only reward is the (often marvelous) view from the top—and the satisfaction of saying that you conquered something you didn’t need to.

Are we having fun yet?

So was playing Baby Steps any fun? Honestly, that’s not the first word I’d use to describe the experience.

To be sure, there’s a lot of humor built into the intentionally punishing designs of some sections, so much so that I often had to laugh even as I fell down yet another slippery hill that erased a huge chunk of my progress. And the promise of more wild cut scenes serves as a pretty fun and compelling carrot to get you through some of the game’s toughest sections.

I’ve earned this moment of zen. Credit: Devolver Digital

More than “fun,” though, I’d say my time with the Baby Steps felt meaningful in a way few games do. Amid all the trolly humor and intentionally obtuse design decisions is a game whose very structure forces you to consider the value of perseverance and commitment.

This is a game that stands proudly against a lot of modern game design trends. It won’t loudly and explicitly point you to the next checkpoint with a huge on-screen arrow. You can’t inexorably grind out stat points in Baby Steps until your character is powerful enough to beat the toughest boss easily. You can’t restart a Baby Steps run and hope for a lucky randomized seed that will get you past a difficult in-game wall.

Baby Steps doesn’t hand you anything. Your abilities and inventory are the same at the game’s start as they are at the end. Any progress you make is defined solely by your mastery of the obtuse movement system and your slowly increasing knowledge of how to safely traverse ever more treacherous terrain.

It’s a structure that can feel punishing, unforgiving, tedious, and enraging in turns. But it’s also a structure that leads to moments of the most genuinely satisfying sense of achievement I can remember having in modern gaming.

It’s about a miles-long journey starting with a single, halting step. It’s about putting one foot in front of the other until you can’t anymore. It’s about climbing the mountain because it’s there. It’s about falling down 1,000 times and getting up 1,001 times.

What else is there in the end?

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

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Judge lets construction on an offshore wind farm resume

injunction, lawsuit, offshore wind, renewable energy, Science, trump administration, wind power / Rejus Almole / September 23, 2025

That did not, however, stop the administration from trying again, this time targeting a development called Revolution Wind, located a bit further north along the Atlantic coast. This time, however, the developer quickly sued, leading to Monday’s ruling. According to Reuters, after a two-hour court hearing at the District Court of DC, Judge Royce Lamberth termed the administration’s actions “the height of arbitrary and capricious” and issued a preliminary injunction against the hold on Revolution Wind’s construction. As a result, Orsted can restart work immediately.

The decision provides a strong indication of how Lamberth is likely to rule if the government pursues a full trial on the case. And while the Trump administration could appeal, it’s unlikely to see this injunction lifted unless it takes the case all the way to the Supreme Court. Given that Revolution Wind was already 80 percent complete, the case may become moot before it gets that far.

Judge lets construction on an offshore wind farm resume Read More »

Volvo says it has big plans for South Carolina factory

Cars, trump tariffs, volvo / Rejus Almole / September 23, 2025

Volvo is undergoing something of a restructuring. The automaker wants to be fully electric by 2040, but for that to happen, it needs to remain in business until then. Earlier this year, that meant layoffs, but today, Volvo announced it has big plans for its North American factory in Ridgeville, South Carolina.

Volvo has been making cars in South Carolina since 2017, starting with the S60 sedan—a decision I always found slightly curious given that US car buyers had already given up on sedans by that point in favor of crossovers and SUVs. S60 production ended last summer, and these days, the plant builds the large electric EX90 SUV and the related Polestar 3.

The company is far from fully utilizing the Ridgeville plant, though, which has an annual capacity of 150,000 vehicles. When the turnaround plan was first announced this July, Volvo revealed it would start building the next midsize XC60 in South Carolina—a wise move given the Trump tariffs and the importance of this model to Volvo’s sales figures here.

Now, the OEM says it will add another model to the mix, with a new, yet-to-be-named hybrid due before 2030.

“Our investment plans once again reinforce our long-term commitment to the US market and our manufacturing operations in South Carolina,” said Håkan Samuelsson, chief executive. “This year, we celebrate 70 years of Volvo Cars presence in the United States. We have sold over 5 million cars there and plan to sell many more in years to come,” he said.

Volvo says it has big plans for South Carolina factory Read More »

After getting Jimmy Kimmel suspended, FCC chair threatens ABC’s The View

brendan carr, Equal Time Rule, jimmy kimmel, Policy, The View / Rejus Almole / September 21, 2025

Carr: “Turn your license in to the FCC, we’ll find something else to do with it.”

President-elect Donald Trump speaks to Brendan Carr, his intended pick for Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, as he attends a SpaceX Starship rocket launch on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. Credit: Getty Images | Brandon Bell

After pressuring ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr is setting his regulatory sights on ABC’s The View and NBC late-night hosts Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon.

Carr appeared yesterday on the radio show hosted by Scott Jennings, who describes himself as “the last man standing athwart the liberal mob.” Jennings asked Carr whether The View and other ABC programs violate FCC rules, and made a reference to President Trump calling on NBC to cancel Fallon and Meyers.

“A lot of people think there are other shows on ABC that maybe run afoul of this more often than Jimmy Kimmel,” Jennings said. “I’m thinking specifically of The View, and President Trump himself has mentioned Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers at NBC. Do you have comments on those shows, and are they doing what Kimmel did Monday night, and is it even worse on those programs in your opinion?”

In response, Carr discussed the FCC’s Equal Opportunities Rule, also known as the Equal Time Rule, and said the FCC could determine that those shows don’t qualify for an exemption to the rule.

“When you look at these other TV shows, what’s interesting is the FCC does have a rule called the Equal Opportunity Rule, which means, for instance, if you’re in the run-up to an election and you have one partisan elected official on, you have to give equal time, equal opportunity, to the opposing partisan politician,” Carr said.

At another point in the interview, Carr said broadcasters that object to FCC enforcement “can turn your license in to the FCC, we’ll find something else to do with it.”

Bona fide news exemption

Carr said the FCC hasn’t previously enforced the rule on those shows because of an exemption for “bona fide news” programs. He said the FCC could determine the shows mentioned by Jennings aren’t exempt:

There’s an exception to that rule called the bona fide news exception, which means if you are a bona fide news program, you don’t have to abide by the Equal Opportunity Rule. Over the years, the FCC has developed a body of case law on that that has suggested that most of these late night shows, other than SNL, are bona fide news programs. I would assume you could make the argument that The View is a bona fide news show but I’m not so sure about that, and I think it’s worthwhile to have the FCC look into whether The View and some of these other programs you have still qualify as bona fide news programs and [are] therefore exempt from the Equal Opportunity regime that Congress has put in place.

The Equal Opportunity Rule applies to radio and TV broadcast stations with FCC licenses to use the airwaves. An FCC fact sheet explains that stations giving time to one candidate must provide “comparable time and placement to opposing candidates” upon request. The onus is on candidates to request air time—”the station is not required to seek out opposing legally qualified candidates and offer them Equal Opportunities,” the fact sheet says.

The exemption mentioned by Carr means that “appearances by legally qualified candidates on bona fide newscasts, interview programs, certain types of news documentaries, and during on-the-spot coverage of bona fide news events are exempt from Equal Opportunities,” the fact sheet says.

In 1994, the FCC said that “Congress removed the inhibiting effect of the equal opportunities obligation upon bona fide news programming to encourage increased news coverage of political campaign activity.” Congress gave the FCC leeway to interpret the scope of bona fide news exemptions.

Referring to its 1988 ruling on Entertainment Tonight and Entertainment This Week, the FCC said it found that “the principal consideration should be ‘whether the program reports news of some area of current events… in a manner similar to more traditional newscasts.’ The Commission has thus declined to evaluate the relative quality or significance of the topics and stories selected for newscast coverage, relying instead on the broadcaster’s good faith news judgment.”

Carr’s allegations

Carr alleged in November 2024 that NBC putting Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live before the election was “a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule.” In fact, NBC gave Trump two free 60-second messages in order to comply with the rule.

Carr didn’t cite any specific incidents on The View or late-night shows that would violate the FCC rule. The View has addressed its attempts to get Trump on the show, however. Executive Producer Brian Teta told Deadline in April 2024, “We’ve invited Trump to join us at the table for both 2016 and 2020 elections, and he declined, and at a certain point, we stopped asking. So I don’t anticipate that changing. I think he’s pretty familiar with how the co-hosts feel about him and doesn’t see himself coming here.”

The Kimmel controversy erupted over a monologue in which he said, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and with everything they can to score political points from it.”

With accused murderer Tyler Robinson being described as having liberal views, Carr and other conservatives alleged that Kimmel misled viewers. Carr appeared on right-wing commentator Benny Johnson’s podcast on Wednesday and said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Nexstar and Sinclair, two major owners of TV stations, both urged ABC to take action against Kimmel and said their stations would not air his show. The pressure from broadcasters is happening at a time when both Nexstar and ABC owner Disney are seeking Trump administration approval for mergers.

Democrats accuse Carr of hypocrisy on First Amendment

Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the Republican-majority FCC, said yesterday that Carr overstepped his authority, but “billion-dollar companies with pending business before the agency” are “vulnerable to pressure to bend to the government’s ideological demands.”

Democratic lawmakers criticized Carr and proposed investigations into the chair for abuse of authority. “It is not simply unacceptable for the FCC chairman to threaten a media organization because he does not like the content of its programming—it violates the First Amendment that you claim to champion,” Senate Democrats wrote in a letter to Carr. “The FCC’s role in overseeing the public airwaves does not give it the power to act as a roving press censor, targeting broadcasters based on their political commentary. But under your leadership, the FCC is being weaponized to do precisely that.”

Democrats pointed to some of Carr’s previous statements in which he decried government censorship. During his 2023 re-confirmation proceedings, Senate Democrats asked Carr about social media posts in which he accused Democrats of engaging in censorship like “what you’d see in the Soviet Union.”

“I posted those tweets in the context of expressing my view on the First Amendment that debate on matters of public interest should be robust, uninhibited, and wide open,” Carr wrote in his response to Democratic senators. “I believe that the best remedy to speech that someone does not like or finds objectionable is more speech. I posted them because I believe that a newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should, consistent with the First Amendment, be beyond the reach of any government official.”

Years earlier, in 2019, Carr posted a tweet that said, “Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not. The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.'”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) also criticized Carr’s approach, saying it would lead to the same tactics being used against Republicans the next time Democrats are in power.

Carr to broadcasters: Give your licenses back to FCC

Carr said this week he’s only addressing licensed broadcasters, which have public-interest obligations, as opposed to cable and streaming services that don’t need FCC licenses. Network programming itself doesn’t need an FCC license, but the TV stations that carry network shows require licenses.

Carr tried to cast Kimmel’s suspension as the result of organic pressure from licensed broadcasters, rather than FCC coercion. “There’s no untoward coercion happening here,” Carr told Jennings. “The market was intended to function this way, where local TV stations get to push back.”

But TV station owners did so in exactly the way that Carr urged them to. “The individual licensed stations that are taking their content, it’s time for them to step up and say this garbage isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities,” Carr said on Johnson’s podcast. Carr said that Kimmel’s monologue “appears to be some of the sickest conduct possible.”

On the Jennings show, Carr alleged that Democrats in the previous administration implemented “a two-tiered weaponized system of justice,” and that his FCC is instead giving everyone “a fair shake and even-handed treatment.”

Carr has repeatedly threatened broadcasters with the FCC’s rarely enforced news distortion policy. As we’ve explained, the FCC technically has no rule or regulation against news distortion, which is why it is called a policy and not a rule. But on Jennings’ show, he described it as a rule.

“We do have those rules at the FCC: If you engage in news distortion, we can take action,” Carr said.

As we’ve written several times, it is difficult legally for the FCC to revoke broadcast licenses. But it isn’t difficult for Carr to exert pressure on networks and broadcasters through public statements. Carr suggested yesterday that broadcasters turn in their licenses if they don’t like his approach to enforcement.

“If you’re a broadcaster and you don’t like being held accountable for the first time in a long time through the public interest standard, that’s fine. You can turn your license in to the FCC, we’ll find something else to do with it,” Carr said. “Or you can go to Congress and say, ‘I don’t want the FCC having public interest obligations on broadcasters anymore, I want broadcasters to be like cable, to be like a streaming service.’ That’s fine too. But as long as that’s the system that Congress has created, we’re going to enforce it.”

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

After getting Jimmy Kimmel suspended, FCC chair threatens ABC’s The View Read More »

Author name: Rejus Almole