Staff

The 20 most-read stories of 2024 on Ars Technica

2024, Features, RECAP, Staff / Paul Patrick / December 25, 2024

Ars looks back at the top stories of the year.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Hey, look at that! Another year has flown by, and I suspect many people would say “good riddance” to 2024.

The 2020s have been quite the decade so far. No matter what insanity has transpired by a particular December 31, the following year has shown up and promptly said, “Hold my beer.”

The biggest news at Ars in 2024 was our first site redesign in nearly a decade. We’re proud of Ars 9.0 (we’re up to 9.0.3 now), and we have continued to make changes based on your feedback. The best kind of feedback, however, is your clicks. Those clicks power this recap, so read on to learn which stories our readers found especially compelling.

20. NASA is about to make its most important safety decision in nearly a generation

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, seen docked at the International Space Station through the window of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. Credit: NASA

In June, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were sent into space for a mission slated to last a little over a week. Six months later, they are still orbiting this terrestrial ball.

The two retired naval test pilots were the first people to catch a ride to orbit on the Boeing Starliner. Unfortunately for them (and Boeing), Starliner developed problems with its propulsion system.

Figuring out how to get them back down to Earth was arguably the biggest safety decision NASA has had to make in decades. Stephen Clark unpacked the situation, looking at how NASA’s culture of safety has evolved since the Challenger accident.

19. macOS 15 Sequoia: The Ars Technica review

One constant in our year-end recaps is operating system reviews. During 2024, Apple’s annual macOS release was the sole OS review to hit the top 20.

Touted as “the AI one,” most of the Apple Intelligence features didn’t show up until macOS 15.1 was released. The overall verdict on Sequoia? 2024’s installment of macOS was a solid update. Andrew Cunningham liked the new window tiling, mostly unchanged backward compatibility, and all of the minor but useful tweaks to many of the built-in apps.

18. What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world

xz Utils is a popular open-source data-compression utility for *nix OSes. In late March, one developer floored developers everywhere when he revealed a backdoor in the utility. The malicious code planted in versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 targeted encrypted SSH connections.

Thankfully, the malicious code was caught before it was merged into Debian and Red Hat. Years in the making and described the “best executed supply chain attack” by one cryptography engineer, the effort came thisclose to success. Dan Goodin explains what we know and how this might have happened.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | NASA

One of the problems humankind faces as we climb out of Earth’s gravitational well is cosmic radiation. On a long voyage to Mars, the crew will need to be protected against solar storms and other space radiation. Right now, ensuring that level of protection would require tons of shielding material, but that may change.

Active shielding was proposed in the 1960s, but the initial research didn’t result in any working prototypes. Now, the ESA and NASA are looking at magnetic fields and electrostatic shields to protect space travelers. Researchers have built and tested small-scale models of their electrostatic shields, and the ESA is working on superconducting magnets.

16. I added a ratgdo to my garage door, and I don’t know why I waited so long

Messing around with the electronics in our dwellings is part of the Ars DNA. In 1998, we were overclocking our Celerons. In 2024, we’re messing with our garage door openers.

Senior Tech Editor Lee Hutchinson hates looking out the back window to see if he remembered to close his garage door, so he stuck a Raspberry Pi out there that would email him every time the garage door opened or closed. Unfortunately for Lee and his Raspberry Pi, Houston is hot and humid for approximately 10 months out of the year, so his tiny computer gave up the ghost after one 98° day too many.

Instead of using the MyQ app that came with his garage door opener, he grabbed a ratgdo—a tiny little board with built-in Wi-Fi that gets wired into the garage door opener’s terminals. The result? A daily experience of the magic of functional home automation.

15. Boston Dynamics’ new humanoid moves like no robot you’ve ever seen

Moves like Jagger? Not quite, but the latest Atlas robot from Boston Dynamics moves like it could bust a move out on the dance floor.

This Atlas uses electricity instead of hydraulics. While the old Atlas was capable of lifting heavy objects and traveling across all kinds of terrain, the heavy and complicated hydraulics made it massive. The all-electric version can move in ways that its predecessor couldn’t, as there are no hydraulic lines to worry about. As a result, the Atlas has an uncanny range of motion.

Hyundai was the first company to test Atlas in a manufacturing environment.

14. Unpatchable vulnerability in Apple chip leaks secret encryption keys

Even though CPU manufacturers have been baking security features into their silicon for some time, malicious actors and researchers keep poking and prodding, looking for security flaws. A group of researchers found a dreaded unpatchable vulnerability in Apple silicon, one that doesn’t even require root access.

The attack, dubbed GoFetch, works against classical and hardened encryption algorithms and can extract a 2048-bit RSA key in less than an hour. It takes advantage of the chips’ data memory-dependent prefetcher, which optimizes performance by reducing latency between the CPU and RAM. Since you can’t patch silicon, the only solution is adding defenses to cryptographic code, and those come with performance penalties.

13. Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot

Depending on how you feel about interacting with actual humans for customer support, the rise of AI customer-service chatbots has been either a boon or a curse. An example of the latter comes courtesy of Air Canada.

Jake Moffatt had to fly from Vancouver to Toronto for his grandmother’s funeral, so he asked Air Canada’s chatbot to explain the airline’s bereavement policy. The chatbot gave Moffatt incorrect instructions, telling him that he could be reimbursed for a reduced bereavement rate up to 90 days of the ticket being issued. Unfortunately for everyone involved, this was not the policy of Air Canada.

The airline refused to honor the policy spelled out by its chatbot, at least until Moffatt took them to small claims court and won. When we last checked, the chatbot was no longer active.

12. In rare move from printing industry, HP actually has a decent idea

Someone touching a piece of paper that's sitting in a printer

There are some days that I long for my old Stylewriter printer. It was slow and dumb as a rock, but it more than adequately performed the function of putting ink on paper. I now have a multifunction printer/scanner/fax that suffers print quality problems partly because of how little it’s used. It might be different if I wanted to spend over $300 for a set of HP-branded toner cartridges instead of roughly $80 for generic ones, but I’d rather live with faded printouts.

HP has rightfully been the target of ire from consumers, and as Scharon pointed out, that company has been a major cause of broken trust between printer OEMs and consumers. So we were all surprised when HP came up with an idea that could simplify and speed up some print jobs. Having a new feature that would improve the printing feature is so much better than, say, using DRM to ensure third-party products don’t function correctly with HP printers.

11. It turns out NASA’s Mars helicopter was much more revolutionary than we knew

Ingenuity made its first flight on Mars in April 2021. Seventy-two flights and nearly three years later, the small helicopter made its last flight. As Eric Berger noted, Ingenuity stood out from other NASA hardware in two ways. First, it proved that powered flight on other worlds was a possibility. Despite Mars’ very thin atmosphere, the copter was able to zoom around on its carbon fiber blades.

More importantly, Ingenuity was built with commercial, off-the-shelf hardware. The success of its mission has opened the door to other possibilities, like flying a nuclear-powered drone through the thick, nitrogen-heavy atmosphere of Titan.

10. After Russian ship docks to space station, astronauts report a foul smell

Around these parts, the usual response to a foul smell is a glance in the dog’s direction. But when you’re in a tiny space station orbiting the Earth, a bad odor is particularly worrying, as astronauts on the International Space Station found out in November.

When the Russian cargo craft docked with the ISS, the Russian cosmonauts that opened the hatch were greeted by a wave of stink. The “toxic” smell was so bad that the Russians immediately shut the hatch.

Ultimately, the astronauts crewing the ISS were not in danger, and after some extra air scrubbing, the hatch was opened and the supplies unloaded.

9. What I learned when I replaced my cheap Pi 5 PC with a no-name Amazon mini desktop

Two cheapo Intel mini PCs, a Raspberry Pi 5, and an Xbox controller for scale. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

One of the fun things about working at Ars Technica is watching Andrew Cunningham stretch the limits of obsolete or inexpensive hardware and software. His attempt to use a Raspberry Pi 5 as a daily-driver desktop had mixed results, but that didn’t stop him from trying out a couple of sub-$200 PCs from Amazon.

Andrew ultimately settled on the $170 Bostgame B100 and $180 GMKtec NucBox G2. Both of them used Intel Processor N100 quad-core chips and could run Windows 11 along with some Linux distros. If you’re curious about what it’s like to use a tiny, inexpensive desktop for your daily computing needs, check out Andrew’s write-up.

8. Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent

Complaining about your employer online is a time-honored tradition. Frustrated workers vent all over the Internet, but the hub of employee griping has historically been Glassdoor. That changed for a lot of folks when Glassdoor inexplicably decided to link real names to formerly anonymous accounts.

When Glassdoor acquired the professional networking app Fishbowl in 2021, every Glassdoor user was also signed up for a Fishbowl account. The big difference is that Fishbowl requires identity verification, so Glassdoor changed its terms of service to require the same.

“Since we require all users to have their names on their profiles, we will need to update your profile to reflect this,” a Glassdoor employee wrote to a user named Monica, reassuring her that “your anonymity will still be protected.” Monica did not trust the company’s assurances that it would go to court to “defeat requests for user information,” instead requesting that Glassdoor delete her account entirely. She wasn’t the only one.

7. What’s happening at Tesla? Here’s what experts think.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Beata Zawrzel

Tesla is responsible for two things: making electronic vehicles a realistic option for most drivers and helping make founder Elon Musk the world’s richest person. But after years of astronomical growth, Tesla has been on a downward slide. The Chinese market has gotten much tougher for Tesla—and everyone else—due to Chinese OEMs churning out low-cost BEVs. There have been safety problems with Tesla, and the company’s once legendary profit margins have crated to below industry average.

What’s going on? Our crack automotive reporter Jonathan Gitlin talked to some experts to see if Tesla was primed for a turnaround or if its slump was indicative of more troubles to come.

6.The Starliner spacecraft has started to emit strange noises

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station on June 13. Credit: NASA

It all started with some weird sounds. “I’ve got a question about Starliner,” astronaut Butch Wilmore radioed down to Mission Control at Johnson Space Center in Houston in late August. “There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker… I don’t know what’s making it.”

While that space oddity turned out to be just a weird anomaly, it may have helped prepare Wilmore and fellow astronaut Suni Williams for the bad Starliner news that followed—and an extra-long stay in orbit.

5. Here’s what it’s like to charge an EV at Electrify America’s new station

A row of EVs charging at EA's flagship location in San Francisco — Credit: Roberto Baldwin

I’ve been an EV owner for five years. During that time I’ve been exposed to just about every facet of EV ownership, including charging on road trips. With the right combination of apps (shoutout to PlugShare) and planning, road trips should be problem-free. But sometimes chargers are few and far between, out of service, crowded, or just plain janky.

Out of all the charging networks—and I’ve tried almost all of them at some point—Electrify America has been the most reliable for me. Their new flagship charging station is a far cry from their outposts typically located at the far end of a giant parking lot connected to a Walmart or Meijer. Instead of aimlessly wandering the aisles of a big-box retailer, drivers can chill in a well-appointed and secure space while their cars are topped off with electrons.

Want to increase EV adoption? Get more of these working, secure, and well-lit stations up and running ASAP.

4. Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else”

Signage outside Dell Technologies headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, US, on Monday, Feb. 6, 2023.

Ars has been all about the remote workforce since our launch in 1998. Once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, remote work became a thing for millions of workers. Some companies have adapted nicely to this new reality, realizing that their employees could do their jobs just as well from the comfort of their homes while pocketing some savings from a reduced office footprint.

Others have been less sanguine about remote work. Some have tried luring workers back to the office with perks, while others—like Dell—have been more coercive in their approach. The PC manufacturer told employees who stayed remote that they would be giving up on promotions or changing roles within the company. Internal tracking data showed that almost half of Dell’s workforce simply shrugged and stayed remote, consequences or not.

3. What I learned from using a Raspberry Pi 5 as my main computer for two weeks

The Raspberry Pi 5 inside its official case. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

We read about Andrew’s experience with a pair of sub-$200 desktop PCs, but this story is what started it all. The spec sheet looked promising enough, with support for two 4K displays running at 60 Hz and space for an internal PCIe SSD, but the experience was not what he’d hoped.

Andrew’s time using the Raspberry Pi 5 as his daily driver started out disappointing, but once he reset his expectations, he ended up pleasantly surprised by the experience.

If you’re looking for the cheapest mini desktop PC possible, you’ll want to look elsewhere, but if you want to see how far along Arm Linux has come, read Andrew’s article.

2. What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back?

The STS-51-B mission begins with the liftoff of the *Challenger* from Pad 39A in April 1985. Credit: NASA

Being strapped into a small space and thundered into space aboard a giant rocket has to be an incredibly stressful experience. But sometimes the stress doesn’t end with a successful launch. We don’t often get to peer behind the curtains and get a glimpse of the mental state of an astronaut, so when we do, it’s jarring.

“Hey, if you guys don’t give me a chance to repair my instrument, I’m not going back,” said astronaut Taylor Wang during a Space Shuttle mission in 1985. The first Chinese-born person in space, Wang was heading up an experiment on the behavior of liquid droplets in microgravity. When it didn’t work at the outset, Wang asked permission to troubleshoot it and make repairs. When Mission Control denied his request, he uttered that chilling sentence.

1. The surprise is not that Boeing lost commercial crew but that it finished at all

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is lifted to be placed atop an Atlas V rocket for its first crewed launch. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Not only has there been a lot of Boeing on this top 20 list, there has been a lot of Boeing in the news all year. And most of that news has been bad.

Eric Berger dives deep into the development of Starliner, outlining the problems and setbacks that plagued its development, trying to answer the big question of how a company like Boeing, which had been at the acme of crewed spaceflight for decades, fell so far behind competition that didn’t even exist 20 years ago?

Thank you for making Ars a daily read during 2024. May you and those you love have a happy and safe holiday season.

Eric Bangeman is the Managing Editor of Ars Technica. In addition to overseeing the daily operations at Ars, Eric also manages story development for the Policy and Automotive sections. He lives in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, where he enjoys cycling, playing the bass, and refereeing rugby.

The 20 most-read stories of 2024 on Ars Technica Read More »

Meet Hyperlight, Ars Technica’s new, even brighter “Light” mode

Staff / Tim Belzer / December 9, 2024

Like many sites, apps, and operating systems, Ars Technica has both “Light” and “Dark” visual styles. They look great! But even the “Light” mode has darker elements in it, and after our recent redesign, some Ars readers asked for an even lighter “Light” mode, one that would allow them to absolutely sear their own retinas with various shades of blinding white. (I kid, of course; for some readers, it’s a serious visual comfort issue.)

We’ve spent the last month working up a third visual style to give the people what they want. Behold the fully armed and operational “Hyperlight” mode, our new visual theme featuring a white background, light gray headline boxes, and black text. You can activate it right now from the visual style menu on the navigation bar at the top of the page.

In total, we now have four visual modes. Hyperlight is the brightest of these, while Day & Night is our rebranded “Light mode” and mixes light and dark elements. Dark is all dark backgrounds with light text. The fourth mode is System, which automatically switches between Day & Night and Dark modes based on your operating system setting. (System will not switch the site to Hyperlight.)

Meet Hyperlight, Ars Technica’s new, even brighter “Light” mode Read More »

Calling all Ars readers! Your feedback is needed.

ars technica, feedback, Staff / Rejus Almole / November 12, 2024

Many of you know that most of our staff is spread out all over these United States, but what you might not know is that it has been more than five years since many of us saw each other in meatspace. Travel budgets and the pandemic conspired to keep us apart, but we are finally gathering Team Ars in New York City later this week. We’d love for you to be there, too, in spirit.

As we gear up for our big fall meeting, we want to hear from you! We’ve set up a special email address, [email protected], just for reader feedback. We won’t harvest your email for spam or some nonsense—we just want to hear from you.

What would we like to hear about? We’re eager to know your thoughts on what we’re doing right, where we could improve, and what you’d like to see more (or less) of. What topics do you think we should be covering that we aren’t? Are we hitting the right balance in our reporting? Is there too much doom and gloom, or not enough? Feel free to be as specific and loquacious as you wish.

This is your chance to speak directly to us and influence our future direction. While we welcome comments on this post, emailing your feedback to [email protected] will help us better organize and address your thoughts during our meeting.

Thanks in advance for helping us make Ars even better!

Calling all Ars readers! Your feedback is needed. Read More »

Recap: Our “AI in DC” conference was great—here’s what you missed

AI, ars events, Artificial Intelligence, event, Events, international spy museum, spy museum, Staff / Rejus Almole / November 7, 2024

Experts were assembled, tales told, and cocktails consumed. It was fun!

Our venue. So spy-ish! Credit: DC Event Photojournalism

Ars Technica descended in force last week upon our nation’s capital, setting up shop in the International Spy Museum for a three-panel discussion on artificial intelligence, infrastructure, security, and how compliance with policy changes over the next decade or so might shape the future of business computing in all its forms. Much like our San Jose event last month, the venue was packed to the rafters with Ars readers eager for knowledge (and perhaps some free drinks, which is definitely why I was there!). A bit over 200 people were eventually herded into one of the conference spaces in the venue’s upper floors, and Ars Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher hopped on stage to take us in.

“Today’s event about privacy, compliance, and making infrastructure smarter, I think, could not be more perfectly timed,” said Fisher. “I don’t know about your orgs, but I know Ars Technica and our parent company, Condé Nast, are currently thinking about generative AI and how it touches almost every aspect or could touch almost every aspect of our business.”

Photograph of a panel discussion — Ars EIC Ken Fisher takes the stage to kick things off. Credit: DC Event Photojournalism

Fisher continued: “I think the media talks about how [generative AI] is going to maybe write news and take over content, but the reality is that generative AI has a lot of potential to help us in finance, to help us with opex, to help us with planning—to help us with pretty much every aspect of our business and in our business. And from what I’m reading online, many folks are starting to have this dream that generative AI is going to lead them into a world where they can replace a lot of SaaS services where they can make a pivot to first-party data.”

First-party data and first-party software development, concluded Fisher, will be critically important when paired with generative AI—”table stakes,” Fisher called them, for participating in the future of business.

After Ken, it was on to our first panel!

“The Key to Compliance with Emerging Technologies”

Up first were Anton Dam, an engineering VP with Auditboard; John Verdi of the Future of Privacy Forum; and Jim Comstock, a cloud storage program director at IBM. The main concern of this panel was how companies will keep up with shifting compliance requirements as the pace of advancement continues to increase.

Each panelist had somewhat of a complementary take. AuditBoard’s Dam emphasized how quickly AI is shifting things around and pointed out the need for organizations to be proactive—to be mindful of regulatory changes before they happen and to have plans in place. “If you want to stay compliant,” Dam said, “you have to be proactive and not wait for, say, agency guidance.”

Photograph of panelists on a stage — Hutchinson, Comstock, Dam, and Verdi. Credit: DC Event Photojournalism

FPF’s John Verdi dwelled for a bit on the challenge of doing just that and balancing innovation against the need to comply with regs. He noted that a “privacy by design” approach for products—where considerations about compliance are factored into something’s design from the very beginning rather than being treated as bolt-ons later—ultimately serves both the customer and the business.

Cross-border compliance also came up—with big cloud providers and data that perhaps resides in different countries, different laws apply. Making sure you’re doing what all of those laws say is hugely complex, and IBM’s Comstock pointed out that customers need to both work with vendors and also hold those vendors accountable for where one’s data resides.

“Data Security in the Age of AI-Assisted Cyber Espionage”

Next, we shifted to an infosec outlook, bringing on a four-person panel that included former Ars Technica senior security editor Sean Gallagher, who is currently keeping the world safe at Sophos X-Ops. Joining Sean were Kate Highnam, an ML engineer at Booz-Allen Hamilton; Dr. Scott White, director of cybersecurity at George Washington University; and Elisa Ortiz, a storage and product marketing director at IBM.

For this panel, we wanted to look at the landscape around us, and Sean kicked the session off with a sobering description of the most profligate cyber threats as they currently exist today. “Pig butchering” was at the top of his list—that is, a shockingly common romance scam where victims are tricked into an emotional connection with a scammer, who then extorts them for money. (As Sean explained, the scammers themselves are often also victims, typically being trapped without their passports in foreign countries and forced to engage in scamming as their only hope to escape back home.) Scams like this increasingly use AI to work around language barriers—if a scammer who only speaks Cantonese targets a victim who only speaks German, for example, the scammers have begun using LLMs to carry on the scam, with LLMs providing not just basic translation but also native colloquialisms and other human-like linguistic tweaks to help sell the scheme.

Dr. Scott White of GWU took us from scams to national security, pointing out how AI can and is transforming intelligence gathering in addition to romance scams. Booz-Allen Hamilton’s Kate Highnam continued this line of discussion, walking us through several ways that machine learning helps with detecting cyber-espionage activities. As good as the tools are, she emphasized that—at least for the foreseeable future—there will continue to need to be a human in the loop when AI is used for detection of crimes. “AI is really good for generalizing our directions,” she said, “but at the end of the day, we have to make sure that we are very clear with our assumptions.”

IBM’s Ortiz closed out the panel by reminding us that threats don’t just come in through the proverbial front door—one of the areas where companies can have significant vulnerabilities is via their backups. As attackers increasingly target backups, Ortiz advocated broad use of predictive analytics and real-time anomaly detection in order to spy out any oddness attackers might be up to.

“The Best Infrastructure Solution for Your AI/ML Strategy”

Our final panel had a deceptively simple title and an impossible task, because there is no “best” infrastructure solution. But there might be a best infrastructure solution for you, and that’s what we wanted to look at. Joining me on stage were Daniel Fenton, head of AI platforms at JLL; Arun Natarajan, director of AI innovation at the IRS; Amy Hirst, VP of site reliability engineering and user experience at IBM; and Matt Klos, an IBM senior solutions architect.

It’s always fascinating to get to ask the IRS anything, and Natarajan gave insightful answers. He opened by contrasting the goals and challenges of the IRS’s IT strategy as a government service organization to the goals of a typical enterprise, and there are obvious significant differences. Fancy features don’t count as much as stability, security, and integration with legacy systems. AI is being looked at where appropriate, but what the IRS needs from AI more than anything else is transparency, and that can sometimes be lacking. “We’re challenged with ensuring ethical AI and transparency to the taxpayer, which requires a different approach than private sector solutions.”

Other panelists, like JLL’s Fenton, emphasized the use of open architecture to ensure flexibility; IBM’s Klos also noted that often, even the best laid plans of data center engineers gang aft agley due not to architecture issues or poor design but to actual physical infrastructure not being what was expected. “One of the biggest pitfalls I see is power,” he explained. “Customers assume it’s everywhere, but it’s often a limiting factor, especially in high-demand AI infrastructure.”

Amy Hirst pointed out that when building one’s own AI/ML setup, traditional performance metrics still apply—and they apply across multiple stacks, including both storage and networking. Her advice sounds somewhat traditional but holds absolutely true, even now. “You have to consider both latency and throughput,” she said. “Both are key to establishing your system’s needs for AI workloads.”

Drinks and everything thereafter

And with that, our panel discussions were done. The group dispersed, with some folks heading downstairs for a private tour of the museum’s Bond in Motion exhibit, which featured the various on-screen rides of 007. Then there was a convergence on the bar and about an hour of fun conversations.

Cocktail time! Did our photographer snag you in a picture? Comment below and say hi! DC Event Photojournalism

For me, the networking and socializing are always the best parts of events like this, and getting to shake hands and swap business cards with Ars readers is one of the most exciting and joyful parts of this job. A special thank you to everyone who stuck around for the cocktail hour and who got a chance to say hi—you’re special, and I’m glad you came to the event!

And if you’re reading this and you’re sad that you didn’t get to make it to any of our events this year, that’s OK—we’ll do more next year. Stay tuned to the front page because Ars might be coming to your town next!

Lee is the Senior Technology Editor, and oversees story development for the gadget, culture, IT, and video sections of Ars Technica. A long-time member of the Ars OpenForum with an extensive background in enterprise storage and security, he lives in Houston.

Recap: Our “AI in DC” conference was great—here’s what you missed Read More »

The Ars redesign is out. Experience its ad-free glory for just $25/year.

ars technica, redesign, Staff, subscriptions / Tim Belzer / November 6, 2024

Whew—the big event is finally behind us. I’m talking, of course, about the Ars Technica version 9 redesign, which we rolled out last month in response to your survey feedback and which we have iterated on extensively in the weeks since. The site is now fully responsive and optimized for mobile browsing, with a sleek new look and great user options.

In response to your comments, our tireless tech and design team of Jason and Aurich have spent the last few weeks adding a font size selector, tweaking the default font and headline layout, and adding the option for orange hyperlinks. Plus, they rolled out an all-new, subscriber-only “wide mode” for Ars superfans who need 100+ character line lengths in their lives. Not enough? Jason and Aurich also tweaked the overall information density (especially on mobile), added next/previous story buttons to articles, and made the nav bar “sticky” on mobile, all in response to your feedback. (Read more about our two post-launch rounds of updates here and here.)

If that’s still not enough site goodness, Jason and Aurich are currently locked in their laboratory, cooking up a brand-new “true light” theme and big improvements to commenting and comment voting.

So while they’re brewing up those potions, I wanted to take a moment to highlight our subscription offering. At just $25 a year, this is a great deal that does more than just support our fully unionized staff; it also offers real quality-of-life benefits to readers. Subs don’t see any ads, nor are they served any trackers. They get access to the ultra-dense “Neutron Star” layout and the bloggy “Ars Classic” view, along with the optional wide-text mode and the ability to filter topics. (Plus full-text RSS feeds, PDF downloads, and some other little goodies.)

The Ars redesign is out. Experience its ad-free glory for just $25/year. Read More »

The Ars redesign 9.0.2 brings the text options you’ve requested

ars redesign, Staff / Kris Guyer / October 29, 2024

Readers of those other sites may not care much about font size and column widths. “40-character line lengths? In 18-point Comic Sans? I love it!” they say. But not you, because you are an Ars reader. And Ars readers are discerning. They have feelings about concepts like “information density.” And we want those feelings to be soft and cuddly ones.

That’s why we’re today rolling out version 9.0.2 of the Ars Technica site redesign, based on your continued feedback, with a special emphasis on text control. (You can read about the changes in 9.0.1 here.) That’s right—we’re talking about options! Font size selection, colored hyperlink text, even a wide column layout for subscribers who plonk down a mere $25/year (possible because we don’t need to accommodate ads for subs).

Here’s a quick visual look at some of the main changes:

Picture of the changes — Along with a clean, ad-free view, subscribers also have the option for a wider text column. In this comparison, the left image shows the Standard width with the text set to Large, while the right shows the Wide width and the text set to Small. Any combination can be mixed and matched for the right level of reading comfort.

And here’s a list of all the changes in this update:

We now have a font size selector with Small, Standard, and Large options
The new default font is smaller; you can return to the previous redesign size by selecting Large
The selector also offers the option to return to using orange links in article copy
We’ve rolled out a new subscriber-only Wide option in the selector for increased density with wider body copy
Once you’ve set your preferred text settings, you can minimize the selector into the page navigation area to get it out of your way
Text settings are stored in the browser, not your account, so you can set them to your preferred style for every device
Headlines and intros to articles are now more compact, and break points for the responsive design have been improved
Story intro images can now be enlarged if you want to see them bigger

Please do let us know how the new options work for you—and if you have any constructive suggestions for continued improvements to the design.

As we process your feedback, do know that we’re already at work on the next batch of improvements, which should be available in the near future.

Soon—a “true light mode” that removes dark background elements for people who prefer that
Soon—improvements to the front-page notifications on your avatar, such as activity in threads where you’ve participated
A little later—a revamp of our front-page comments and voting system, with more nuanced options

So enjoy! And thanks for reading.

The text settings icon lives next to the opening of the story by default (or right above the copy on mobile views). If you click the Minimize to Nav button the button will instead live in your nav, out of the way until you need it again.

The Ars redesign 9.0.2 brings the text options you’ve requested Read More »

Based on your feedback, the Ars 9.0.1 redesign is live

ars technica, redesign, site news, Staff / Mike M. / October 11, 2024

We love all the feedback that Ars readers have submitted since we rolled out the Ars Technica 9.0 design last week—even the, err, deeply passionate remarks. It’s humbling that, after 26 years, so many people still care so much about making Ars into the best possible version of itself.

Based on your feedback, we’ve just pushed a new update to the site that we hope fixes many readers’ top concerns. (You might need to hard-refresh to see it.)

Much of the feedback (forum posts, email, DMs, the Ars comment form) has told us that the chief goals of the redesign—more layout options, larger text, better readability—were successful. But readers have also offered up interesting edge cases and different use patterns for which design changes would be useful. Though we can’t please everyone, we will continue to make iterative design tweaks so that the site can work well for as many people as possible.

So here’s a quick post about what we’ve done so far and what we’re going to be working on over the next few weeks. As usual, continued feedback is welcome and appreciated!

Changes made and changes planned

The 9.0 design was based on reader feedback; an astonishing 20,000 people took our most recent reader survey, and most of these readers don’t post in the comments or the Ars forums. The consensus was that readability and customization were the most significant site design issues. We’ve addressed those through (among other things) a responsive design that unifies desktop and mobile codebases, increased text size to meet modern standards, and four site layout options (Classic, Grid, List, and the super-dense Neutron Star view).

Based on your feedback, the Ars 9.0.1 redesign is live Read More »

Welcome to our latest design update, Ars 9.0!

ars technica, Features, site redesign, Staff / Rejus Almole / October 2, 2024

Greetings from the Orbiting HQ!

As you can see, we’ve refreshed the site design. We hope you’ll come to love it. Ars Technica is a little more than 26 years old, yet this is only our ninth site relaunch (number eight was rolled out way back in 2016!).

We think the Ars experience gets better with each iteration, and this time around, we’ve brought a ton of behind-the-scenes improvements aimed squarely at making the site faster, more readable, and more customizable. We’ve added responsive design, larger text, and more viewing options. We’ve also added the highly requested “Most Read” box so you can find our hottest stories at a glance. And if you’re a subscriber, you can now hide certain topics that we cover—and never see those stories again.

(Most of these changes were driven by your feedback to our big reader survey back in 2022. We can’t thank you enough for giving us your time with these surveys, and we hope to have another one for you before too long.)

We know that change is unsettling, and no matter how much we test internally, a new design will also contain a few bugs, edge cases, and layout oddities. As always, we’ll be monitoring the comments on this article and making adjustments for the next couple of weeks, so please report any bugs or concerns you run into. (And please be patient with the process—we’re a small team!)

The two big changes

One of the major changes to the site in this redesign has been a long time coming: Ars is now fully responsive across desktop and mobile devices. For various reasons, we have maintained separate code bases for desktop and mobile over the years, but that has come to an end—everything is now unified. All site features will work regardless of device or browser/window width. (This change will likely produce the most edge cases since we can’t test on all devices.)

The other significant change is that Ars now uses a much larger default text size. This has been the trend with basically every site since our last design overhaul, and we’re normalizing to that. People with aging eyes (like me!) should appreciate this, and mobile users should find things easier to read in general. You can, of course, change it to suit your preferences.

Most other changes are smaller in scope. We’re not introducing anything radically different in our stories or presentation, just trying to make everything work better and feel nicer.

Smaller tweaks

The front-page experience largely remains what you know, with some new additions. Our focus here was on two things:

Providing more options to let people control how they read Ars
Giving our subscribers the best experience we can

To that end, we now have four different ways to view the front page. They’re not buried in a menu but are right at the top of the page, arranged in order of information “density.” The four views are called:

Classic: A subscriber-only mode—basically, what’s already available to current subs. Gives you an old-school “blog” format. You can scroll and see the opening paragraphs of every story. Click on those you want to read.

Grid: The default view, an updated version of what we currently have. We’re trying some new ways of presenting stories so that the page feels like it has a little more hierarchy while still remaining almost completely reverse-chronological.

List: Very much like our current list view. If you just want a reverse chronology with fewer bells and whistles, this is for you.

Neutron Star: The densest mode we’ve ever offered—and another subscriber-only perk. Neutron Star shows only headlines and lower decks, with no images or introductory paragraphs. It’s completely keyboard navigable. You can key your way through stories, opening and collapsing headlines to see a preview. If you want a minimal, text-focused, power-user interface, this is it.

The sub-only modes will offer non-subscribers a visual preview for anyone who wants to see them in action.

Another feature we’re adding is a “Most Read” box. Top stories from the last 24 hours will show up there, and the box is updated in real time. We’ve never offered readers a view into what stories are popping quite like this, and I’m excited to have it.

If you’re a subscriber, you can also customize this box to any single section you’d like. For instance, if you change it to Space, you will see only the top space stories here.

Speaking of sections, we’re breaking out all of our regular beats into their own sections now, so it will be much easier to find just space or health or AI or security stories.

And as long as we’re looking at menus, of course our old friend “dark mode” is still here (and is used in all my screenshots), but for those who like to switch their preference automatically by system setting, we now offer that option, too.

Not interested in a topic? Hide it

Our last reader survey generated a ton of responses. When we asked about potential new subscriber features, we heard a clear message: People wanted the ability to hide topics that didn’t interest them. So as a new and subscriber-only feature, we’re offering the ability to hide particular topic areas.

In this example, subscribers can hide the occasional shopping posts we still do for things like Amazon sales days. Or maybe you want to skip articles about cars, or you don’t want to see Apple content. Just hide it. As you can see, we’re adding a few more categories here than exist in our actual site navigation so that people aren’t forced to hide entire topic areas to avoid one company or product. We don’t have an Apple or a Google section on the site, for instance, but “Apple” and “Google” stories can still be hidden.

A little experimenting may be needed to dial this in, but please share your feedback; we’ll work out any kinks as people use the tool for a while and report back.

Ars longa, vita brevis

This is our ninth significant redesign in the 26-year history of Ars Technica. Putting on my EIC hat in the late ’90s, I couldn’t have imagined that we’d be around in 2024, let alone being stronger than ever, reaching millions of readers around the globe each month with tech news, analysis, and hilarious updates on the smart-homification of Lee’s garage. In a world of shrinking journalism budgets, your support has enabled us to employ a fully unionized staff of writers and editors while rolling out quality-of-life updates to the reading experience that came directly from your feedback.

Everyone wants your subscription dollars these days, but we’ve tried hard to earn them at Ars by putting readers first. And while we don’t have a paywall, we hope you’ll see a subscription as the perfect way to support our content, sustainably nix ads and tracking, and get special features like new view modes and topic hiding. (Oh—and our entry-level subscription is still just $25/year, the same price it was in 2000.)

So thanks for reading, subscribing, and supporting us through the inevitable growing pains that accompany another redesign. Truly, we couldn’t do any of it without you.

And a special note of gratitude goes out to our battalion of two, Ars Creative Director Aurich Lawson and Ars Technical Director Jason Marlin. Not only have they done all the heavy lifting to make this happen, but they did it while juggling everything else we throw at them.

Welcome to our latest design update, Ars 9.0! Read More »

Ars asks: What was the last CD or DVD you burned?

apple superdrive, Biz & IT, CD, cd burning, CD-R, cd-rw, disc burning, dvd, dvd-r, dvd-rw, Optical disc, optical media, Staff, staffsource, SuperDrive / Rejus Almole / August 10, 2024

i like my alcohol at 120% —

With the demise of Apple’s SuperDrive, we reminisce on our final homemade optical discs.

Lee Hutchinson – Aug 9, 2024 3: 20 pm UTC

Photograph of a CD-R disc on fire — Enlarge / This is one method of burning a disc.

1001slide / Getty Images

We noted earlier this week that time seems to have run out for Apple’s venerable SuperDrive, which was the last (OEM) option available for folks who still needed to read or create optical media on modern Macs. Andrew’s write-up got me thinking: When was the last time any Ars staffers actually burned an optical disc?

Lee Hutchinson, Senior Technology Editor

It used to be one of the most common tasks I’d do with a computer. As a child of the ’90s, my college years were spent filling and then lugging around giant binders stuffed with home-burned CDs in my car to make sure I had exactly the right music on hand for any possible eventuality. The discs in these binders were all labeled with names like “METAL MIX XVIII” and “ULTRA MIX IV” and “MY MIX XIX,” and part of the fun was trying to remember which songs I’d put on which disc. (There was always a bit of danger that I’d put on “CAR RIDE JAMS XV” to set the mood for a Friday night trip to the movies with all the boys, but I should have popped on “CAR RIDE JAMS XIV” because “CAR RIDE JAMS XV” opens with Britney Spears’ “Lucky”—look, it’s a good song, and she cries in her lonely heart, OK?!—thus setting the stage for an evening of ridicule. Those were just the kinds of risks we took back in those ancient days.)

It took a while to try to figure out what the very last time I burned a disc was, but I’ve narrowed it down to two possibilities. The first (and less likely) option is that the last disc I burned was a Windows 7 install disc because I’ve had a Windows 7 install disc sitting in a paper envelope on my shelf for so long that I can’t remember how it got there. The label is in my handwriting, and it has a CD key written on it. Some quick searching shows I have the same CD key stored in 1Password with an “MSDN/Technet” label on it, which means I probably downloaded the image from good ol’ TechNet, to which I maintained an active subscription for years until MS finally killed the affordable version.

But I think the actual last disc I burned is still sitting in my car’s CD changer. It’s been in there so long that I’d completely forgotten about it, and it startled the crap out of me a few weeks back when I hopped in the car and accidentally pressed the “CD” button instead of the “USB” button. It’s an MP3 CD instead of an audio CD, with about 120 songs on it, mostly picked from my iTunes “’80s/’90s” playlist. It’s pretty eclectic, bouncing through a bunch of songs that were the backdrop of my teenage years—there’s some Nena, some Stone Temple Pilots, some Michael Jackson, some Tool, some Stabbing Westward, some Natalie Merchant, and then the entire back half of the CD is just a giant block of like 40 Cure songs, probably because I got lazy and just started lasso-selecting.

It turns out I left CDs the same way I came to them—with a giant mess of a mixtape.

Connor McInerney, Social Media Manager

Like many people, physical media for me is deeply embedded with sentimentality; half the records in my vinyl collection are hand-me-downs from my parents, and every time I put one on, their aged hiss reminds me that my folks were once my age experiencing this music in the same way. This goes doubly so for CDs as someone whose teen years ended with the advent of streaming, and the last CD I burned is perhaps the most syrupy, saccharine example of this media you can imagine—it was a mixtape for the girl I was dating during the summer of 2013, right before we both went to college.

In hindsight this mix feels particularly of its time. I burned it using my MacBook Pro (the mid-2012 model was the last to feature a CD/DVD drive) and made the artwork by physically cutting and pasting a collage together (which I made the mix’s digital artwork by scanning and adding in iTunes). I still make mixes for people I care about using Spotify—and I often make custom artwork for said playlists with the help of Photoshop—but considering the effort that used to be required, the process feels unsurprisingly unsatisfying in comparison.

As for the musical contents of the mix, imagine what an 18-year-old Pitchfork reader was listening to in 2013 (Vampire Weekend, Postal Service, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, and anything else you might hear playing while shopping at an Urban Outfitters) and you’ve got a pretty close approximation.

Ars asks: What was the last CD or DVD you burned? Read More »

Ars is seeking a seasoned senior reporter for all things Google

android, ars, Feature, Google, hiring, jobs at ars, Staff, Tech / Paul Patrick / July 25, 2024

get your ron on —

Got feelings about the future of AI and/or phone bezel width? Come apply!

Ars Staff – Jul 25, 2024 6: 00 pm UTC

A photograph of — Enlarge / If you get hired for this position, you’ll be provided an assistant. It’s this guy. This guy is your assistant. His name is “Googly.”

Google is a company in transformation—but “from what“ and “to what“ are not always clear. To catalog and examine Google’s moves in this new era of generative AI, Ars Technica is hiring a Senior Technology Reporter to focus on Google, AI, Android, and search. While attention to so-called “consumer products” will be important, this role will be more focused on Google’s big moves as a technology and infrastructure company, moves often made to counter perceived threats from companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity. Informed skepticism is the rule around here, so we’re looking for someone with the chops to bring a critical eye to some deep technical and business issues.

As this is a senior role owning an important beat, it is not an entry-level position. We’re looking for someone who can primarily self-direct when it comes to their reporting and someone who is comfortable working remotely within a similarly remote team. We’d also like someone who can bring to the table deep and intelligent analyses on broader Google topics while also hitting smaller daily news stories.

This is a full-time union job with benefits.

All candidates:

Must have prior professional experience in technology journalism
Must be living in and eligible to work in the United States
Should expect to travel two to three times per year for major event coverage
Must be comfortable with fully remote work

The full job description and official details can all be found at the listing on the Condé Careers site. If this sounds like the job for you, please apply!

Ars is seeking a seasoned senior reporter for all things Google Read More »

I abandoned OpenLiteSpeed and went back to good ol’ Nginx

Features, hosting, litespeed, litespeed web server, Nginx, openlitespeed, php, php-fpm, space city weather, Staff, Tech, web hosting, web server / Kris Guyer / January 27, 2024

Adventures in server babysitting —

One weather site’s sudden struggles, and musings on why change isn’t always good.

Lee Hutchinson – Jan 26, 2024 3: 29 pm UTC

Since 2017, in what spare time I have (ha!), I help my colleague Eric Berger host his Houston-area weather forecasting site, Space City Weather. It’s an interesting hosting challenge—on a typical day, SCW does maybe 20,000–30,000 page views to 10,000–15,000 unique visitors, which is a relatively easy load to handle with minimal work. But when severe weather events happen—especially in the summer, when hurricanes lurk in the Gulf of Mexico—the site’s traffic can spike to more than a million page views in 12 hours. That level of traffic requires a bit more prep to handle.

For a very long time, I ran SCW on a backend stack made up of HAProxy for SSL termination, Varnish Cache for on-box caching, and Nginx for the actual web server application—all fronted by Cloudflare to absorb the majority of the load. (I wrote about this setup at length on Ars a few years ago for folks who want some more in-depth details.) This stack was fully battle-tested and ready to devour whatever traffic we threw at it, but it was also annoyingly complex, with multiple cache layers to contend with, and that complexity made troubleshooting issues more difficult than I would have liked.

So during some winter downtime two years ago, I took the opportunity to jettison some complexity and reduce the hosting stack down to a single monolithic web server application: OpenLiteSpeed.

Out with the old, in with the new

I didn’t know too much about OpenLiteSpeed (“OLS” to its friends) other than that it’s mentioned a bunch in discussions about WordPress hosting—and since SCW runs WordPress, I started to get interested. OLS seemed to get a lot of praise for its integrated caching, especially when WordPress was involved; it was purported to be quite quick compared to Nginx; and, frankly, after five-ish years of admining the same stack, I was interested in changing things up. OpenLiteSpeed it was!

The OLS admin console, showing vhosts. This is from my personal web server rather than the Space City Weather server, but it looks the same. If you want some deeper details on the OLS config I was using, <a href= — Enlarge / The OLS admin console, showing vhosts. This is from my personal web server rather than the Space City Weather server, but it looks the same. If you want some deeper details on the OLS config I was using, check my blog. Yeah, I still have a blog. I’m old.

Lee Hutchinson

The first significant adjustment to deal with was that OLS is primarily configured through an actual GUI, with all the annoying potential issues that brings with it (another port to secure, another password to manage, another public point of entry into the backend, more PHP resources dedicated just to the admin interface). But the GUI was fast, and it mostly exposed the settings that needed exposing. Translating the existing Nginx WordPress configuration into OLS-speak was a good acclimation exercise, and I eventually settled on Cloudflare tunnels as an acceptable method for keeping the admin console hidden away and notionally secure.

Enlarge / Just a taste of the options that await within the LiteSpeed Cache WordPress plugin.

Lee Hutchinson

The other major adjustment was the OLS LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress, which is the primary tool one uses to configure how WordPress itself interacts with OLS and its built-in cache. It’s a massive plugin with pages and pages of configurable options, many of which are concerned with driving utilization of the Quic.Cloud CDN service (which is operated by LiteSpeed Technology, the company that created OpenLiteSpeed and its for-pay sibling, LiteSpeed).

Getting the most out of WordPress on OLS meant spending some time in the plugin, figuring out which of the options would help and which would hurt. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are plenty of ways in there to get oneself into stupid amounts of trouble by being too aggressive with caching.) Fortunately, Space City Weather provides a great testing ground for web servers, being a nicely active site with a very cache-friendly workload, and so I hammered out a starting configuration with which I was reasonably happy and, while speaking the ancient holy words of ritual, flipped the cutover switch. HAProxy, Varnish, and Nginx went silent, and OLS took up the load.

I abandoned OpenLiteSpeed and went back to good ol’ Nginx Read More »

The 20 most-read stories of 2023

Staff, Year in review / Paul Patrick / December 26, 2023

Every so often, you live through a year that you know you’re going to remember. Sometimes it’s because of a personal milestone. Other times it’s because of noteworthy events that affected all of us in one way or another. And in some years, it’s because we were all surprised by unanticipated and rapid technological advances.

2023 definitely will be a year that will be remembered. On the tech side, the biggest story was AI, due in no small part to rapid advances in large language models. We had news about space flight, hackers, operating systems, and even music players.

Read on to find out which stories resonated the most with our readers throughout the year.

20. The Ars guide to time travel in the movies

Depending on the screenwriting, time travel can be one of the best plot devices in a movie… or one of the most confusing, if done poorly. As we have come to better understand the nature of time, Hollywood has begun producing more flicks that use it as part of the story.

Our ace science reporter Jennifer Ouellette happens to be married to a physicist with his own subreddit, so we decided to turn them loose on the topic of time travel and the movies to see which films had the best combination of entertainment and scientific rigor. Read on to find out where Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, 12 Monkeys, and Hot Tub Time Machine ended up.

19. The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

Largely considered relics of a bygone computing era, over 10,000 mainframe computers are still used today. Used primarily by Fortune 500 companies, most of these mainframes are sold by IBM. With a lineage dating back to technological advancements of the 1950s, these computers still excel with some high-volume use cases, especially those involving banking.

There used to be a bunch of companies in the mainframe game, but Rand, GE, NEC, Honeywell, and just about everyone else either no longer exists or is no longer building mainframes. IBM is now the only mainframe manufacturer that matters, so check out the story to learn why some companies still do some of their computing on mainframes instead of in the cloud.

18. macOS 14 Sonoma: The Ars Technica review

I cannot remember a top-20 list that didn’t include a macOS review. But this may be the furthest down the list it has ever appeared, and this is actually the only OS review to appear on this year’s list.

This is due in no small part to how major OS updates come out like clockwork once a year, even when there are no major new features to excite users. These days, OS updates can be met with grumbling due to unnecessary UI changes and hardware obsolescence. Sonoma is another “low key” update, as Andrew Cunningham described it in his usual, comprehensive review. Call it “Ventura plus” or whatever you like—Sonoma is business as usual.

17. Android app from China executed 0-day exploit on millions of devices

Ah, it’s our first 0-day of the 2023 countdown. This one primarily affected users of third-party app stores and involved the Pinduoduo app, downloaded millions of times. As Dan Goodin described it:

“[T]he malicious Pinduoduo app includes functionality allowing for the app to be installed covertly with no ability to be uninstalled, falsely inflating the number of Pinduoduo daily active users and monthly active users, uninstalling competitor apps, stealing user privacy data, and evading various privacy compliance regulations.”

Yikes.

The versions of the app in Google Play and Apple’s App Store did not contain the backdoor.

The 20 most-read stories of 2023 Read More »