Rejus Almole – Page 9

Mother of one of Elon Musk’s offspring sues xAI over sexualized deepfakes

AI, ai sex images, Deepfakes, elon musk, grok, Policy, syndication, xAI / Rejus Almole / January 17, 2026

The news comes as xAI and Musk have come under fire over fake sexualized images of women and children, which proliferated on the platform this year, particularly after Musk jokingly shared an AI-altered post of himself in a bikini.

Over the past week, the issue has prompted threats of fines and bans in the EU, UK, and France, as well as investigations by the California attorney-general and Britain’s Ofcom regulator. Grok has also been banned in Indonesia and Malaysia.

On Wednesday, xAI took action to restrict the image-generation function on its Grok AI model to block the chatbot from undressing users, insisting that it removed Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) and non-consensual nudity material.

St Clair, who has in recent months been increasingly critical of Musk, is also seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent xAI from generating images that undress her.

“Ms St Clair is humiliated, depressed, fearful for her life, angry and desperately in need of action from this court to protect her against xAI’s facilitation of this unfathomable nightmare,” lawyers wrote in a filing seeking the restraining order.

xAI filed a lawsuit against St Clair in Texas on Thursday, claiming she had breached the company’s terms of service by bringing her lawsuit against the company in a New York court instead of in Texas.

Earlier this week, Musk also said on X that he would be filing for “full custody” of their 1-year-old son Romulus, after St Clair apologized for sharing posts critical of transgender people in the past. Musk, who has a transgender child, has repeatedly been critical of transgender people and the rights of trans individuals.

Additional reporting by Kaye Wiggins in New York.

Mother of one of Elon Musk’s offspring sues xAI over sexualized deepfakes Read More »

Rackspace customers grapple with “devastating” email hosting price hike

Biz & IT, Cloud, email, Rackspace / Rejus Almole / January 16, 2026

“We had really good reseller pricing that we negotiated with Rackspace due to the number of mailboxes we had with them and how long we had been a customer. All of that seemed to vanish when they notified us of their new pricing,” he said.

Ars contacted Rackspace asking about the 706 percent price hike that Laughing Squid says it’s facing, why Rackspace decided to increase its prices now, and why it didn’t give its partners more advanced notice. A company spokesperson responded, saying:

Rackspace Email is a reliable and secure business-class email solution for small businesses. To continue delivering the service levels our customers expect, effective March 2026, Rackspace Technology is increasing the price of Rackspace Email. We have a support team available to help our customers to discuss their options.

The spokesperson added that Rackspace’s “mission is to deliver quality, trusted and reliable hosted email solution for businesses.”

Email hosting is a tough business

Despite Rackspace’s stated commitment to email hosting, the prohibitive pricing seems like a deterrent for a business being viewed as high-effort and low-margin. Email has grown complex over the years, requiring time and expertise for proper management at scale. It’s become simpler, or more lucrative, for some cloud companies to focus on selling their managed services on top of offerings like Microsoft 365—as Rackspace does—or Google Workspace and let the larger companies behind those solutions deal with infrastructure costs and complexities.

Rackspace’s price hike also comes as an AI-driven RAM shortage is impacting the availability and affordability of other computing components, including storage.

With Rackspace, which went public in 2020, also having quit hosting Microsoft Exchange following a costly 2022 ransomware attack, the Texas-headquartered company may be looking to minimize its email hosting duties as much as possible.

Meanwhile, Laughing Squid is increasing prices for Rackspace mailboxes and offering services with a different email provider, PolarisMail, to customers at lower prices. Beale said he has reached out to Rackspace about the new pricing but hasn’t heard back yet.

Rackspace customers grapple with “devastating” email hosting price hike Read More »

Archaeologists find a supersized medieval shipwreck in Denmark

Archaeology, maritime archaeology, medieval Europe, nautical archaeology, Science, shipwrecks / Rejus Almole / January 16, 2026

the wreck and the story of the wreck

The sunken ship reveals that the medieval European economy was growing fast.

This is a replica of another cog, based on an excavated shipwreck from Bremen. Note the sterncastle. Credit: VollwertBIT

Archaeologists recently found the wreck of an enormous medieval cargo ship lying on the seafloor off the Danish coast, and it reveals new details of medieval trade and life at sea.

Archaeologists discovered the shipwreck while surveying the seabed in preparation for a construction project for the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. It lay on its side, half-buried in the sand, 12 meters below the choppy surface of the Øresund, the straight that runs between Denmark and Sweden. By comparing the tree rings in the wreck’s wooden planks and timbers with rings from other, precisely dated tree samples, the archaeologists concluded that the ship had been built around 1410 CE.

photo of a scuba diver swimming over wooden planks underwater — The Skaelget 2 shipwreck, with a diver for scale. Credit: Viking Ship Museum

A medieval megaship

Svaelget 2, as archaeologists dubbed the wreck (its original name is long since lost to history), was a type of merchant ship called a cog: a wide, flat-bottomed, high-sided ship with an open cargo hold and a square sail on a single mast. A bigger, heavier, more advanced version of the Viking knarrs of centuries past, the cog was the high-tech supertanker of its day. It was built to carry bulky commodities from ports in the Netherlands, north around the coast of Denmark, and then south through the Øresund to trading ports on the Baltic Sea—but this one didn’t quite make it.

Most cogs would have been about 15 to 25 meters long and 5 to 8 meters wide, capable of carrying about 200 tons of cargo—big, impressive ships for their time. But Svaelget 2, an absolute unit of a ship, measured about 28 meters from bow to stern, 9 meters wide, and could have carried about 300 tons. Its size alone was a surprise to the archaeologists.

“We now know, undeniably, that cogs could be this large—that the ship type could be pushed to this extreme,” said archaeologist Otto Uldum of Denmark’s Viking Ship Museum, who led the excavation, in a press release.

Medieval Europe’s merchant class was growing in both size and wealth in the early 1400s, and the cog was both a product of that growth and the engine driving it. The mere fact of its existence points to a society that could afford to invest in building big, expensive trading ships (and could confidently expect a return on that investment). And physically, it’s a product of the same trading networks it supplied: while the heavy timbers of its frame were cut locally in the Netherlands, the Pomeranian oak planks of Svaelget 2’s hull came from Poland.

“The cog revolutionized trade in northern Europe,” said Uldum. “It made it possible to transport goods on a scale never seen before.”

The super ship’s superb superstructure

For about 600 years, layers of sand had protected the starboard (right, for you landlubbers) side of the wreck from erosion and decay. Nautical archaeologists usually find only the very bottoms of cogs; the upper structures of the ship—rigging, decks, and castles—quickly decay in the ocean. That means that some of the most innovative parts of the ships’ construction appear only in medieval drawings and descriptions.

But Svaelget 2 offers archaeologists a hands-on look at the real deal, from rigging to the ship’s galley and the stern castle: a tall wooden structure at the back of the ship, where crew and passengers could have sought at least a little shelter from the elements. Medieval drawings and texts describe cogs having high castles at both bow and stern, but archaeologists have never gotten to examine a real one to learn how it’s put together or how it connects with the rest of the ship’s construction.

“We have plenty of drawings of castles, but they have never been found because usually only the bottom of the ship survives,” said Uldum. “[The castle] is a big step forward compared to Viking Age ships, which had only open decks in all kinds of weather.”

Lying on and around the remains of the cog’s decks, Uldum and his colleagues also found stays (ropes that would have held the mast in place) and lines for controlling the ship’s single square sail, along with ropes and chains that would once have secured the merchant vessel’s cargo in the open hold.

Life at sea in the Middle Ages

The cog would probably have sailed with between 30 and 45 crew members. No remains were found on the wreck, but the lost crew left behind small, tantalizing traces of their lives and their presence. Uldum and his colleagues found combs, shoes, and rosary beads, along with dishes and tableware.

“The sailor brought his comb to keep his hair neat and his rosary to say his prayers,” said Uldum (and one has to picture the sailor’s grandmother beaming proudly at that description). “These personal objects show us that the crew brought everyday items with them. They transferred their life on land to life at sea.”

Life at sea, for the medieval sailors aboard Svaelget 2, would have included at least occasional hot meals, cooked in bronze pots over an open fire in the ship’s galley and eaten on dishes of ceramic and painted wood. Bricks (about 200 of them) and tiles formed a sort of fireplace where the cook could safely build a fire aboard the otherwise very flammable ship.

“It speaks of remarkable comfort and organization on board,” said Uldum. “Now sailors could have hot meals similar to those on land, instead of the dried and cold food that previously dominated life at sea.” Plenty of dried meat and cold biscuits still awaited sailors for the next several centuries, of course, but when weather and time permitted, at least the crew of Svaelget 2 could gather around a hot meal. The galley would have been a relatively new part of shipboard life for sailors in the early 1400s—and it quickly became a vital one.

Cargo? Go where?

One thing usually marks the site of a shipwreck, even when everything else has disintegrated into the ocean: ballast stones. When merchant ships were empty, they carried stones in their holds to help keep the ship stable; otherwise, the empty ship would be top-heavy and prone to tipping over, which is usually not ideal. (Modern merchant vessels use water, in special tanks, for ballast.) But Uldum and his colleagues didn’t find ballast stones on Svaelget 2, which means the cog was probably fully laden with cargo when it sank.

But the cargo is also conspicuously absent. Cogs were built to carry bulk goods—things like bricks, grain and other staple foods, fabric, salt, and timber. Those goods would have been stowed in an open hold amidships, secured by ropes and chains (some of which remain on the wreck). But barrels, boards, and bolts of fabric all float. As the ship sank and water washed into the hold, it would have carried away the cargo.

Some of it may have washed up on the shores or even more distant beaches, becoming a windfall for local residents. The rest probably sank to the bottom of the sea, far from the ship and its destination.

Kiona is a freelance science journalist and resident archaeology nerd at Ars Technica.

Archaeologists find a supersized medieval shipwreck in Denmark Read More »

Mandiant releases rainbow table that cracks weak admin password in 12 hours

Biz & IT, hashes, ntlm, password cracking, Security / Rejus Almole / January 16, 2026

Microsoft released NTLMv1 in the 1980s with the release of OS/2. In 1999, cryptanalyst Bruce Schneier and Mudge published research that exposed key weaknesses in the NTLMv1 underpinnings. At the 2012 Defcon 20 conference, researchers released a tool set that allowed attackers to move from untrusted network guest to admin in 60 seconds, by attacking the underlying weakness. With the 1998 release of Windows NT SP4 in 1998, Microsoft introduced NTLMv2, which fixed the weakness.

Organizations that rely on Windows networking aren’t the only laggards. Microsoft only announced plans to deprecate NTLMv1 last August.

Despite the public awareness that NTLMv1 is weak, “Mandiant consultants continue to identify its use in active environments,” the company said. “This legacy protocol leaves organizations vulnerable to trivial credential theft, yet it remains prevalent due to inertia and a lack of demonstrated immediate risk.”

The table first assists attackers in providing the proper answer to a challenge that Windows sends during the authentication process by using a known plaintext attack with the challenge 1122334455667788. Once the challenge has been solved, the attacker obtains the Net-NTLMv1 hash and uses the table to rapidly crack it. Typically tools including Responder, PetitPotam, and DFSCoerce are involved.

In a thread on Mastodon, researchers and admins applauded the move, because they said it would give them added ammunition when trying to convince decision makers to make the investments to move off the insecure function.

“I’ve had more than one instance in my (admittedly short) infosec career where I’ve had to prove the weakness of a system and it usually involves me dropping a sheet of paper on their desk with their password on it the next morning,” one person said. “These rainbow tables aren’t going to mean much for attackers as they’ve likely already got them or have far better methods, but where it will help is in making the argument that NTLMv1 is unsafe.”

The Mandiant post provides basic steps required to move off of NTLMv1. It links to more detailed instructions.

“Organizations should immediately disable the use of Net-NTLMv1,” Mandiant said. Organizations that get hacked because they failed to heed will have only themselves to blame.

Mandiant releases rainbow table that cracks weak admin password in 12 hours Read More »

RAM shortage chaos expands to GPUs, high-capacity SSDs, and even hard drives

AMD, GeForce, NVIDIA, Radeon, ram shortage, samsung, SanDisk, Seagate, SSDs, Tech, Western Digital / Rejus Almole / January 16, 2026

Big Tech’s AI-fueled memory shortage is set to be the PC industry’s defining story for 2026 and beyond. Standalone, direct-to-consumer RAM kits were some of the first products to feel the bite, with prices spiking by 300 or 400 percent by the end of 2025; prices for SSDs had also increased noticeably, albeit more modestly.

The rest of 2026 is going to be all about where, how, and to what extent those price spikes flow downstream into computers, phones, and other components that use RAM and NAND chips—areas where the existing supply of products and longer-term supply contracts negotiated by big companies have helped keep prices from surging too noticeably so far.

This week, we’re seeing signs that the RAM crunch is starting to affect the GPU market—Asus made some waves when it inadvertently announced that it was discontinuing its GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.

Though the company has since tried to walk this announcement back, if you’re a GPU manufacturer, there’s a strong argument for either discontinuing this model or de-prioritizing it in favor of other GPUs. The 5070 Ti uses 16GB of GDDR7, plus a partially disabled version of Nvidia’s GB203 GPU silicon. This is the same chip and the same amount of RAM used in the higher-end RTX 5080—the thinking goes, why continue to build a graphics card with an MSRP of $749 when the same basic parts could go to a card with a $999 MSRP instead?

Whether Asus or any other company is canceling production or not, you can see why GPU makers would be tempted by the argument: Street prices for the RTX 5070 Ti models start in the $1,050 to $1,100 range on Newegg right now, where RTX 5080 cards start in the $1,500 to $1,600 range. Though 5080 models may need more robust boards, heatsinks, and other components than a 5070 Ti, if you’re just trying to maximize the profit-per-GPU you can get for the same amount of RAM, it makes sense to shift allocation to the more expensive cards.

RAM shortage chaos expands to GPUs, high-capacity SSDs, and even hard drives Read More »

Calif. counters FCC attack on DEI with conditions on Verizon/Frontier merger

California, Frontier, Policy, verizon / Rejus Almole / January 16, 2026

Verizon has received all approvals it needs for a $9.6 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications, an Internet service provider with about 3.3 million broadband customers in 25 states. Verizon said it expects to complete the merger on January 20.

The last approval came from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which allowed the deal in a 5–0 vote yesterday. There were months of negotiations that resulted in requirements to deploy more fiber and wireless infrastructure, offer $20-per-month Internet service to people with low incomes for the next decade, and other commitments, including some designed to replace the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies that Verizon had to end because of demands by the Trump administration.

“The approval follows extensive public participation, testimony from multiple parties, and negotiated settlement agreements with consumer advocates and labor organizations,” the CPUC said yesterday.

Verizon struck the merger deal with Frontier in September 2024, agreeing to pay $9.6 billion in cash and assume over $10 billion in debt held by Frontier. The all-cash transaction is valued at $20 billion including debt. Verizon said yesterday that the merged firm “will have an expanded reach of almost 30 million fiber passings across 31 states and Washington, DC.”

Verizon to expand network, maintain low-income plans

Verizon’s interest in its home Internet business has waxed and waned over the years, but the company seems pretty committed to fiber and fixed wireless home Internet these days. Part of the deal involves Verizon buying back a former portion of its network that it sold to Frontier almost 10 years ago. In 2016, Frontier bought Verizon’s FiOS and DSL operations in Florida, California, and Texas.

At yesterday’s CPUC meeting, Commissioner John Reynolds described Verizon’s commitments. Verizon will deploy fiber to 75,000 new locations within five years, prioritizing census blocks with income at or below 90 percent of the county median, he said. For wireless service, Verizon is required to deploy 250 new cell sites with 5G and fixed wireless capability in areas eligible for state broadband grants and areas with high fire threats, he said.

Calif. counters FCC attack on DEI with conditions on Verizon/Frontier merger Read More »

“I am very annoyed”: Pharma execs blast RFK Jr.’s attack on vaccines

anti-vaccine, health, pharmaceutical, Robert F Kenned Jr. / Rejus Almole / January 15, 2026

Waiting for the midterms

But pharmaceutical executives don’t appear comforted by the pushback. “Today it may be childhood vaccines or mRNA, but tomorrow it’s everything,” Noubar Afeyan, co-founder and chairman of Moderna, maker of mRNA vaccines, said. “We have to say not just ‘why is this happening?,’ but ‘Where will it stop?’”

As a bad flu season is underway, Dean Li, president of Merck Research Laboratories, noted that the anti-vaccine rhetoric is hitting seasonal flu shots. “With the pressure on vaccination, I cannot foresee flu vaccination increasing in this country over the next three years,” he said in a presentation.

Sanofi Chief Executive Paul Hudson had a similarly pessimistic outlook. “It’s clear this administration has a particular sensitivity around vaccination, and indeed pediatric vaccination,” Hudson said. “I’m asked all the time ‘what are you going to do to fix this?,’ and the truth is we just need to stay extremely objective and continue presenting the evidence. There’s really very little else we can do,” except wait for the midterm elections, he said.

“We will have to maintain a steely focus on the long-term future of vaccines and deal with any uncertainty around vaccine coverage rates in the short-term based on misinformation, Facebook posts, and statements from the top,” he said.

Bourla also worried about the conditions Kennedy is creating to attack drug makers. Kennedy, who is an environmental lawyer with no scientific or medical background, has profited from lawsuits against vaccine makers, as have many of his allies and advisors. “There is also a lot of plaintiffs’ playbook there,” Bourla said. “Everybody will start litigating.”

“I am very annoyed”: Pharma execs blast RFK Jr.’s attack on vaccines Read More »

Are people avoiding iOS 26 because of Liquid Glass? It’s complicated.

Apple, ios 18, ios 26, Tech / Rejus Almole / January 15, 2026

are people really skipping Liquid Glass?

Liquid Glass is controversial, but adoption rates aren’t as low as they seem.

iPhones running iOS 26. Credit: Apple

Last week, news about the adoption rates for Apple’s iOS 26 update started making the rounds. The new update, these reports claim, was being installed at dramatically lower rates than past iOS updates. And while we can’t infer anything about why people might choose not to install iOS 26, the conclusion being jumped to is that iPhone users are simply desperate to avoid the redesigned Liquid Glass user interface.

The numbers do, in fact, look bad: Statcounter data for January suggests that the various versions of iOS 26 are running on just 16.6 percent of all devices, compared to around 70 percent for the various versions of iOS 18. The iOS 18.7 update alone—released at the same time as iOS 26.0 in September for people who wanted the security patches but weren’t ready to step up to a brand-new OS—appears to be running on nearly one-third of all iOS devices.

Those original reports were picked up and repeated because they tell a potentially interesting story of the “huge if true” variety: that users’ aversion to the Liquid Glass design is so intense and widespread that it’s actively keeping users away from the operating system. But after examining our own traffic numbers, as well as some technical changes made in iOS 26, it appears Statcounter’s data is dramatically undercounting the number of iOS 26 devices in the wild.

We’ve taken a high-level look at all iPhone traffic across all Condé Nast websites for October, November, and December of 2025 and compared it to traffic from October, November, and December of 2024. This data suggests that iOS 26 is being adopted more slowly than iOS 18 was the year before—roughly 76 percent of all iPhone pageviews came from devices running iOS 18 in December of 2024, compared to about 45 percent for iOS 26 in December of 2025.

That’s not as cataclysmic a dropoff as Statcounter’s data suggests, even before considering other mitigating factors—iOS 26 dropped support for 2018’s iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR, for example, while iOS 18 ran on every iPhone that could run iOS 17.

But it’s still a much slower rate of adoption than we’re used to for most iOS versions, and it’s something to monitor as we get closer to iOS 27 and Apple’s first opportunity to make major changes to Liquid Glass. And to monitor it, it’s important to be able to measure it correctly. There have been behind-the-scenes changes to iOS 26 that appear to have thrown off Statcounter’s data collection—let’s talk about those, about what our own data shows, and about why you may want to upgrade to iOS 26 soon even if you don’t care for Liquid Glass.

User agent string changes in iOS 26

It turns out that telling an iOS 18 device from an iOS 26 device is harder than it ought to be, and that’s because of a change Apple made to Safari in iOS 26.

Web analytics software (and services like Statcounter) attempt to gather device data by looking at the browser’s user agent string, a short list of information about the hardware, operating system, browser, and browser engine. There are benign and useful reasons to collect this kind of data. If you’re a web developer fielding a ton of user complaints from people who are all using a specific browser or OS version, it can help you narrow down what the issue is and test a fix. You could also use the user agent string to decide whether to show the desktop or mobile version of your site to a user.

But if this information is too accurate or detailed, it can lead to “fingerprinting”—the ability for sites to identify a specific user or specific type of user from their user-agent string. Browser makers have taken steps, both together and separately, to reduce the amount of fingerprinting that is possible.

And occasionally, browsers will intentionally misrepresent their user agent string for compatibility reasons. For example, the default user agent string for Safari running on modern versions of iPadOS claims that the browser is running on top of macOS to make sites rendered on an iPad work more like sites rendered on a Mac. Apple froze the macOS version in Safari’s user agent string to 10.15.7 several years ago, partly to reduce fingerprinting and partly to resolve compatibility problems that some sites had when Apple put “macOS 11” in the user agent string after decades of macOS 10.

All of this is to say: information derived from the user-agent string is only as accurate as the OSes and browsers that are reporting their user-agent strings. And in iOS 26, Apple decided to freeze the iOS version in Safari’s user agent string to version 18 in order to reduce fingerprinting (credit to developer and blogger Niels Leenheer, who both explained this change and confirmed with Apple engineer Karl Dubost why it was made).

Which explains why anyone looking at Statcounter’s data could draw incorrect conclusions about iOS 26 adoption: because most iOS users are running Safari, and because all Safari versions running on iOS 26 are claiming to be running on iOS 18.6 or 18.7 instead.

Only third-party browsers like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge are reporting an iOS version of 26 in their user agent strings, so what Statcounter is inadvertently measuring is the number of Chrome users who have updated to iOS 26, not the total number of users who have updated.

What our data says

There is a workaround for this, at least for iOS. Safari on iOS 26 will report an iOS version of 18.6 or 18.7, but it also reports a Safari version of 26.x. This isn’t as useful on macOS, where Safari 26 could be running on macOS 14 Sonoma, macOS 15 Sequoia, or macOS 26 Tahoe. But on iOS, Safari 26 only runs on iOS 26, so it’s a useful proxy for identifying the operating system version.

	iOS 18 Safari pageviews in 2024	iOS 26 Safari pageviews in 2025
October	24.9%	22.1%
November	35.1%	26.3%
December	75.9%	45.3%

For these stats, we’ve grouped together all devices claiming to run Safari 26 on an iPhone, regardless of whether the underlying iOS version is listed as 18.x or 26.x (some apps or third-party browsers using Apple’s built-in WebKit engine can still identify themselves as “Safari,” though Chrome, Edge, and Mozilla Firefox at least report their own user-agent strings). We’ve compared those numbers to all devices claiming to run Safari 18 on iPhones claiming to run iOS 18. This does screen out users running third-party browsers on iPhones, but Statcounter data suggests that the ratio of Safari to Chrome users on iOS hasn’t changed much over that period.

What’s interesting is that for October 2024 and October 2025—the first full month that iOS 18 and iOS 26 were available, respectively—adoption numbers don’t look all that different. About 25 percent of iPhone pageviews across all Condé Nast were served to devices running Safari on iOS 18, compared to 22 percent for iOS 26 the following year. That is a step down, but it suggests that early adopters weren’t repelled en masse by Liquid Glass or anything else about the operating system.

But the gap widens over the next two months, which does suggest that “normal” users aren’t in a rush to get the update. By December 2024, our data shows that 76 percent of iPhone Safari pageviews were going to iOS 18 devices, compared to just 45 percent for iOS 26 in December 2025.

Adoption of new iOS versions does plateau after a while. Adoption of iOS 18 hit 80 percent in January 2025, according to our data, and then rose more slowly afterward, peaking at around 91 percent in August 2025. Those stats are in the same ballpark as both Statcounter data (78 percent as of August 2025) and the last stats Apple has published (82 percent of all iPhones as of June 2025) for iOS 18. (We’ve asked the company if it has any updated internal stats to share and will update the article if we receive a response.)

We’ll see where iOS 26 eventually settles. If I’m Apple, I’m a bit less worried about slower adoption as long as iOS 26 eventually hits that same 80 to 90 percent range. But if usage settles significantly below that historical watermark, it could signal a more lasting negative response to the iOS 26 update that needs to be addressed in future versions.

Why it’s time to take the plunge, even if you don’t like Liquid Glass

Apple’s most recent security updates for iOS 18 are only available for phones that can’t run iOS 26 at all, like the iPhone XR. That means it’s probably time to install iOS 26 even if you don’t like Liquid Glass. Credit: Samuel Axon

However you feel about Liquid Glass, we’re getting to the point that upgrading is going to become necessary for people who want security patches and functional fixes for their phones.

For a short time after each new iOS version is released, Apple continues to provide security patches for the previous version of iOS, for people who would rather wait for early bugs in the new OS to be patched. The company started this practice in 2021, when it provided security patches for iOS 14 for a couple of months after the release of iOS 15. But those patches don’t last forever, and eventually devices that can upgrade to the new operating system will need to do it to stay patched.

Apple never formally announces when these security updates have stopped, but you can tell by looking at the company’s security updates page. The iOS 18.7, 18.7.1, and 18.7.2 updates all apply to the “iPhone XS and later.” But the iOS 18.7.3 update released on December 12, 2025, only applies to the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR. It’s a subtle difference, but it means that Apple is only continuing to patch iOS 18 on devices that can’t run iOS 26.

This is standard practice for iPhones and iPads, but it differs from the update model Apple uses for macOS—any Mac can continue to download and install security updates for macOS 14 Sonoma and macOS 15 Sequoia, regardless of whether they’re eligible for the macOS 26 Tahoe upgrade.

If you skipped the early versions of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 because of Liquid Glass, the good news is that Apple provided options to allow users to tone down the effect. The iOS 26.1 update added a “tinted” option for Liquid Glass, increasing the interface’s contrast and opacity to help with the legibility issues you’ll occasionally run into with the default settings. The company also added opacity controls for the lock screen clock in iOS 26.2. Personally, I also found it helpful to switch the Tabs view in the Safari settings from “Compact” to “Bottom” to make the browser look and act more like it did in its iOS 18-era iteration.

Those settings may feel like half-measures to hardcore Liquid Glass haters who just want Apple to revert to its previous design language. But if you’ve got a modern iPhone or iPad and you want to stay up to date and secure, those toggles (plus additional controls for motion and transparency in the Accessibility settings) may at least ease the transition for you.

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.

Are people avoiding iOS 26 because of Liquid Glass? It’s complicated. Read More »

Bully Online mod taken down abruptly one month after launch

Bully, fivem, gaming, grand theft auto, gta, Mods, multiplayer, rockstar / Rejus Almole / January 15, 2026

A PC mod that added online gameplay to Rockstar’s 2006 school-exploration title Bully was abruptly taken down on Wednesday, roughly a month after it was first made available. While the specific reason for the “Bully Online” takedown hasn’t been publicly discussed, a message posted by the developers to the project’s now-defunct Discord server clarifies that “this was not something we wanted.”

The Bully Online mod was spearheaded by Swegta, a Rockstar-focused YouTuber who formally announced the project in October as a mod that “allows you and your friends to play minigames, role-play, compete in racing, fend off against NPCs, and much more.”

At the time of the announcement, Swegta said the mod was “a project me and my team have been working on for a very long time” and that early access in December would be limited to those who contributed at least $8 to a Ko-Fi account. When December actually rolled around, though, a message on Swegta.com (archived) suggested that the mod was being released freely as an open source project, with a registration page (archived) offering new accounts to anyone.

That source code has now been completely removed from Swegta.com, along with any webpages referencing the project or offering downloads for the mod’s custom launcher. On Discord, the team said that development of any Bully Online scripts would stop and that any account data created by users would be deleted.

Bully Online mod taken down abruptly one month after launch Read More »

A British redcoat’s lost memoir resurfaces

culture, disability, history, military history, Science / Rejus Almole / January 14, 2026

Shadrack Byfield lost his left arm in the War of 1812; his life sheds light on post-war re-integration.

Actor Chris McKay playing Shadrack Byfield (center) in the 2011 PBS documentary The War of 1812. Credit: Tom Fournier

History buffs are no doubt familiar with the story of Shadrack Byfield, a rank-and-file British redcoat who fought during the War of 1812 and lost his left arm to a musket ball for his trouble. Byfield has been featured in numerous popular histories—including a children’s book and a 2011 PBS documentary—as a shining example of a disabled soldier’s stoic perseverance. But a newly rediscovered memoir that Byfield published in his later years is complicating that idealized picture of his post-military life, according to a new paper published in the Journal of British Studies.

Historian Eamonn O’Keeffe of Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, Canada, has been a Byfield fan ever since he read the 1985 children’s novel, Redcoat, by Gregory Sass. His interest grew when he was working at Fort York, a War of 1812-era fort and museum, in Toronto. “There are dozens of memoirs written by British rank-and-file veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, but only a handful from the War of 1812, which was much smaller in scale,” O’Keeffe told Ars. “Byfield’s autobiography seemed to offer an authentic, ground-level view of the fighting in North America, helping us look beyond the generals and politicians and grapple with the implications of this conflict for ordinary people.

Born in 1789 in Wiltshire’s Bradford-on-Avon suburbs, Byfield’s parents intended him to follow in his weaver father’s footsteps. He enlisted in the county militia when he turned 18 instead, joining the regular army the following year. When the War of 1812 broke out, Byfield was stationed at Fort George along the Niagara River, participating in the successful siege of Fort Detroit. At the Battle of Frenchtown in January 1813, he was shot in the neck, but he recovered sufficiently to join the campaigns against Fort Meigs and Fort Stephenson in Ohio.

After the British were defeated at the Battle of Thames later that year, he escaped into the woods with indigenous warriors, despite his concerns that they meant to kill him. They did not, and Byfield eventually rejoined other British fugitives and made his way back to the British lines. He was one of 15 out of 110 soldiers in his light company still alive after 18 months of fighting.

But his luck ran out in July 1914. While engaged in a skirmish at Conjocta Creek, a musket ball tore through his left forearm. Surgeons were forced to amputate after gangrene set in—a procedure that was performed without anesthesia. Byfield described the operation as “tedious and painful” in A Narrative of a Light Company Soldier’s Service, the memoir he published in 1840, adding, “I was enabled to bear it pretty well.”

Byfield famously became incensed when he discovered his severed limb had been tossed into a dung heap with other amputated body parts. He retrieved his forearm and insisted on giving it a proper burial in a makeshift coffin he built himself. Due to his injury, Byfield’s military career was over, and he returned to England. While he was given an army pension, the sum (nine pence per day) was inadequate to support the veteran’s growing family.

Byfield couldn’t take up his father’s weaving trade because it took two hands to operate a loom. But according to his 1840 Narrative, he had a dream one night of an “instrument” that would enable him to work a loom with just one arm, which he successfully built with the help of a local blacksmith. He found work spinning thread at a textile mill and weaving it into finished cloth, augmenting that trade by working as a wheelchair attendant at a spa in Bath, among other odd jobs. He later found a mentor in Colonel William Napier, a distinguished veteran and military historian who arranged for an increase in Byfield’s pension, as well as finding a publisher for the Narrative.

A shifting narrative

Byfield’s 1840 memoir became a much-cited source for historians of the War of 1812 since it offered a personal perspective on those events from a rank-and-file British soldier. Historians had long assumed that Byfield died around 1850. But during his research, O’Keeffe discovered a second Byfield memoir in the collection of the Western Reserve Historical Society, published in 1851, entitled History and Conversion of a British Soldier. O’Keeffe believes this to be the only surviving copy of the 1851 memoir.

“I quickly noticed that [Byfield] appeared in British census records past the c.1850 date at which he was supposed to have died, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia entry on Byfield and other sources,” said O’Keeffe. “This discrepancy was my first indication that there might be more to discover on Byfield, and every time I returned to the subject I kept finding more information.” Byfield actually died in January 1874 at 84 years old. While historians had also assumed that Byfield was functionally illiterate, O’Keeffe found a draft manuscript of the 1840 memoir in Byfield’s handwriting, suggesting the soldier had acquired those skills after the war.

“My initial interest was sparked by the wartime memoir I already knew about, but I was increasingly fascinated by his later life, and what it could tell us about the experiences of veterans in general,” said O’Keeffe. “In most history books, British redcoats take center stage for the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of the Waterloo, but then quickly vanish from view; no doubt this is true for veterans of most if not all wars. Military memoirs of the period tend to encourage this dynamic by ending the story at demobilization, assuming that readers would not be interested in the civilian experiences of their authors. But Byfield’s very well-documented life helps bring the process of reintegration, of rebuilding one’s life after war and catastrophic injury, into sharper focus, and highlights the presence of war veterans in 19th-century British society.”

According to O’Keeffe, Byfield painted a much less rosy picture of his post-military life in the 1851 memoir, recounting his struggles with poverty and lingering rheumatic pain in his left stump. (“Oftentimes I was not able to lift my hand to my head, nor a teacup to my mouth,” the former soldier wrote.) When textile mills started closing, he relocated his family to Gloucestershire and eked out a living as a tollkeeper and by selling copies of his earlier Narrative for a shilling. He admitted to taking absence without leave during his war service and participating in plundering expeditions. The later memoir also recounts Byfield’s spiritual awakening and growing religious faith.

Byfield adopted very different narrative themes in his 1840 and 1851 memoirs. “In the 1840 narrative, Byfield sought to impress wealthy patrons by presenting himself as a dutiful soldier and deserving veteran,” said O’Keeffe. “The 1851 memoir, by contrast, was a spiritual redemption story, with Byfield tracing his progress from rebellious sinner to devout and repentant Christian. In the 1851 memoir, the veteran also dwells on periods of indebtedness, illness, and unemployment after returning to England, whereas in his earlier memoir he described maintaining his family ‘comfortably’ with his weaving prosthesis for nearly twenty years.”

Byfield’s luck seemed to change for the better when the Duke of Beaufort became a patron, first hiring the veteran as a gardener on the duke’s Badminton estate. Byfield complained in his 1851 account that the estate steward refused to pay him full wages because he was one-handed, insisting, “I never saw the man that would compete with me with one arm.”

Eventually, Byfield leveraged his connection to the duke to be named caretaker of a 100-foot tower monument to Lord Edward Somerset that was built in the Gloucestershire village of Hawkesbury Upton in 1845. This came with a keeper’s cottage, and the duties were light: Byfield maintained the tower, sold souvenir booklets, and welcomed any sightseers every day except Sundays.

Alas, Byfield became embroiled in a feud over control of the village’s Particular Baptist chapel; some objected to the doctrine and conduct of the minister, John Osborne, while others, like Byfield, defended him. There were lawsuits, arson, vandalism, and a charge of public drunkenness against Byfield, which he vehemently denied. Everything came to a head in an “unholy riot” in the chapel, during which Byfield was accused of starting the fight by “pushing about” and slashing someone’s eye and face with his prosthetic iron hook. Every rioter was acquitted, but the incident cost Byfield his cushy caretaker job in 1853.

Byfield later moved back to his hometown, Bradford-on-Avon, and married a widow after his first wife died. He kept petitioning for further increases to his pension, to no avail, and started peddling a third memoir in 1867 entitled The Forlorn Hope. No copies have survived, per O’Keeffe, but it did garner coverage in a local newspaper, which described the account as relating “the Christian experience of this Wiltshire hero and the great persecutions and trials he has passed through.”

“Years ago, I would have characterized the veteran as someone who was astonishingly phlegmatic about what happened to him,” said O’Keeffe. “Byfield’s description of the amputation comes across as remarkably unemotional to modern readers, and then he presents himself at the end of the first memoir as having literally dreamt up the prosthetic that allowed him to return to his civilian trade and live happily ever after, more or less.”

But as he studied Byfield’s writings more closely, “It became clear that the process of reintegration was far less smooth than this version of events would suggest, and that Byfield’s time in the army shaped the rest of his life in profound ways,” said O’Keeffe. “The fact that Byfield’s daughter chose to put her father’s military rank and regiment in the ‘occupation’ column on his death certificate, rather than listing any of the other jobs the veteran had held in the six decades since his amputation, is the most eloquent testimony of this, I think.”

Journal of British Studies, 2025. DOI: 10.1017/jbr.2025.10169 (About DOIs).

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

A British redcoat’s lost memoir resurfaces Read More »

Lawsuit: DHS wants “unlimited subpoena authority” to unmask ICE critics

censorship, Department of Homeland Security, DHS, First Amendment, ice, Policy / Rejus Almole / January 13, 2026

Defending online anonymity

DHS is weirdly using import/export rules to expand its authority to identify online critics.

A Border Patrol Tactical Unit agent sprays pepper spray into the face of a protestor attempting to block an immigration officer vehicle from leaving the scene where a woman was shot and killed by a federal agent earlier, in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026. Credit: Star Tribune via Getty Images / Contributor | Star Tribune

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is fighting to unmask the owner of Facebook and Instagram accounts of a community watch group monitoring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity in Pennsylvania.

Defending the right to post about ICE sightings anonymously is a Meta account holder for MontCo Community Watch, John Doe.

Doe has alleged that when the DHS sent a “summons” to Meta asking for subscriber information, it infringed on core First Amendment-protected activity, i.e., the right to publish content critical of government agencies and officials without fear of government retaliation. He also accused DHS of ignoring federal rules and seeking to vastly expand its authority to subpoena information to unmask ICE’s biggest critics online.

“I believe that my anonymity is the only thing standing between me and unfair and unjust persecution by the government of the United States,” Doe said in his complaint.

In response, DHS alleged that the community watch group that posted “pictures and videos of agents’ faces, license plates, and weapons, among other things,” was akin to “threatening ICE agents to impede the performance of their duties.” Claiming that the subpoena had nothing to do with silencing government critics, they argued that a statute regulating imports and exports empowered DHS to investigate the group’s alleged threats to “assault, kidnap, or murder” ICE agents.

DHS claims that Meta must comply with the subpoena because the government needs to investigate a “serious” threat “to the safety of its agents and the performance of their duties.”

On Wednesday, a US district judge will hear arguments to decide if Doe is right or if DHS can broadly unmask critics online by claiming it’s investigating supposed threats to ICE agents. With more power, DHS officials have confirmed they plan to criminally prosecute critics posting ICE videos online, Doe alleged in a lawsuit filed last October.

DHS seeking “unlimited subpoena authority”

DHS alleged that the community watch group posting “pictures and videos of agents’ faces, license plates, and weapons, among other things,” was akin to “threatening ICE agents to impede the performance of their duties.” Claiming that the subpoena had nothing to do with silencing government critics, they argued that DHS is authorized to investigate the group and that compelling interest supersedes Doe’s First Amendment rights.

According to Doe’s most recent court filing, DHS is pushing a broad reading of a statute that empowers DHS to subpoena information about the “importation/exportation of merchandise”—like records to determine duties owed or information to unmask a drug smuggler or child sex trafficker. DHS claims the statute isn’t just about imports and exports but also authorizes DHS to seize information about anyone they can tie to an investigation of potential crimes that violate US customs laws.

However, it seems to make no sense, Doe argued, that Congress would “silently embed unlimited subpoena authority in a provision keyed to the importation of goods.” Doe hopes the US district judge will agree that DHS’s summons was unconstitutional.

“The subscriber information for social media accounts publishing speech critical of ICE that DHS seeks is completely unrelated to the importation/exportation of merchandise; the records are outside the scope of DHS’s summons power,” Doe alleged.

And even if the court agrees on DHS’s reading of the statute, DHS has not established that unmasking the owner of the community watch accounts would be relevant to any legitimate criminal investigation, Doe alleged.

Doe’s posts were “pretty innocuous,” lawyer says

To convince the court that the case was really about chilling speech, Doe attached every post made on the group’s Facebook and Instagram feeds. None show threats or arguably implicit threats to “assault, kidnap, or murder any federal official,” as DHS claimed. Instead, the users shared “information and resources about immigrant rights, due process rights, fundraising, and vigils,” Doe said.

Ariel Shapell, an attorney representing Doe at the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, told Ars that “if you go and look at the content on the Facebook and Instagram profiles at issue here, it’s pretty innocuous.”

DHS claimed to have received information about the group supposedly “stalking and gathering of intelligence on federal agents involved in ICE operations.” However, Doe argued that “unsurprisingly, neither DHS nor its declarant cites any post even allegedly constituting any such threat. To the contrary, all posts on these social media accounts constitute speech addressing important public issues fully protected under the First Amendment,” Doe argued.

“Reporting on, or even livestreaming, publicly occurring immigration operations is fully protected First Amendment activity,” Doe argued. “DHS does not, and cannot, show how such conduct constitutes an assault, kidnapping, or murder of a federal law enforcement officer, or a threat to do any of those things.”

Anti-ICE backlash mounting amid ongoing protests

Doe’s motion to quash the subpoena arrives at a time when recent YouGov polling suggests that Americans have reached a tipping point in ending support for ICE. YouGov’s poll found more people disapprove of how ICE is handling its job than approve, following the aftermath of nationwide anti-ICE protests over Renee Good’s killing. ICE critics have used footage of tragic events—like Good’s death and eight other ICE shootings since September—to support calls to remove ICE from embattled communities and abolish ICE.

As sharing ICE footage has swayed public debate, DHS has seemingly sought to subpoena Meta and possibly other platforms for subscriber information.

In October, Meta refused to provide names of users associated with Doe’s accounts—as well as “postal code, country, all email address(es) on file, date of account creation, registered telephone numbers, IP address at account signup, and logs showing IP address and date stamps for account accesses”—without further information from DHS. Meta then gave Doe the opportunity to move to quash the subpoena to stop the company from sharing information.

That request came about a week after DHS requested similar information from Meta about six Instagram community watch groups that shared information about ICE activity in Los Angeles and other locations. DHS withdrew those requests after account holders defended First Amendment rights and filed motions to quash the subpoena, Doe’s court filing said.

It’s unclear why DHS withdrew those subpoenas but maintained Doe’s. DHS has alleged that the government’s compelling interest in Doe’s identity outweighs First Amendment rights to post anonymously online. The agency also claimed it has met its burden to unmask Doe as “someone who is allegedly involved in threatening ICE agents and impeding the performance of their duties,” which supposedly “touches DHS’s investigation into threats to ICE agents and impediments to the performance of their duties.”

Whether Doe will prevail is hard to say, but Politico reported that DHS’s “defense will rest on whether DHS’s argument that posting videos and images of ICE officers and warnings about arrests is considered criminal activity.” It may weaken DHS’s case that Border Patrol Tactical Commander Greg Bovino recently circulated a “legal refresher” for agents in the field, reminding them that protestors are allowed to take photos and videos of “an officer or operation in public,” independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported.

Shapell told Ars that there seems to be “a lot of distance” between the content posted on Doe’s accounts and relevant evidence that could be used in DHS’s alleged investigation into criminal activity. And meanwhile, “there are just very clear First Amendment rights here to associate with other people anonymously online and to discuss political opinions online anonymously,” Shapell said, which the judge may strongly uphold as core protected activity as threats of government retaliation mount.

“These summonses chill people’s desire to communicate about these sorts of incredibly important developments on the Internet, even anonymously, when there’s a threat that they could be unmasked and investigated for this really core First Amendment protected activity,” Shapell said.

A win could reassure Meta users that they can continue posting about ICE online without fear of retaliation should Meta be pressed to share their information.

Ars could not immediately reach DHS for comment. Meta declined to comment, only linking Ars to an FAQ to help users understand how the platform processes government requests.

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.

Lawsuit: DHS wants “unlimited subpoena authority” to unmask ICE critics Read More »

Starlink tries to stay online in Iran as regime jams signals during protests

Iran, Policy, starlink / Rejus Almole / January 13, 2026

The Iranian government’s jamming of Starlink has apparently gotten more sophisticated, degrading uploads to make it hard for users to distribute information and images of protests. “I believe that they are using some military-grade jamming tools to jam the radio frequency signals, particularly jamming any videos, any content, any reports coming out of Iran,” Ahmad Ahmadian, executive director of US-based nonprofit Holistic Resilience, told The Washington Post.

“You don’t need a global kill switch to cripple the network,” Kimberly Burke, director of government affairs at consulting firm Quilty Space, told the Post. “You just make it unstable, slow and unreliable enough that it barely even works. Think intermittent dial-up speeds.”

Internet monitoring group NetBlocks told Reuters that Starlink access is reduced but not eliminated in Iran. “It is patchy, but still there,” NetBlocks founder Alp Toker said.

Internet traffic “effectively dropped to zero”

NetBlocks has been posting updates on Mastodon, saying that Iran’s connectivity to the outside world has remained at about 1 percent of ordinary levels. “Iran has now been offline for 120 hours,” NetBlocks said today. “Despite some phone calls now connecting, there is no secure way to communicate and the general public remain cut off from the outside world.”

Cloudflare’s monitoring reached similar conclusions. “In the last few days, Internet traffic from Iran has effectively dropped to zero,” Cloudflare Head of Data Insight David Belson wrote in a blog post today.

Although connectivity was restored for brief periods on January 9, “no significant changes have been observed in Iran’s Internet traffic since January 10,” he wrote. “The country remains almost entirely cut off from the global Internet, with internal data showing traffic volumes remaining at a fraction of a percent of previous levels.”

A fundraising page for sending Starlink terminals to Iran and covering subscription costs says that “over 100,000 people in Iran are already using Starlink to bypass censorship.” Since the government can’t fully block the service, it has used bans and banking sanctions to make it “extremely difficult for users inside Iran to pay for their subscriptions,” the fundraising page says.

NasNet said today that service is now being made available for free. “After weeks of continuous efforts, negotiations, and discussions with the Starlink team and United States authorities, we have successfully provided access to Starlink for free to serve the revolution,” NasNet wrote on X, according to a translation. “All you need to do is turn on the device. Don’t forget physical camouflage, hiding the Starlink IP, and changing the wireless network name!”

Starlink tries to stay online in Iran as regime jams signals during protests Read More »

Author name: Rejus Almole