TVs offer us an escape from the real world. After a long day, sometimes there’s nothing more relaxing than turning on your TV, tuning into your favorite program, and unplugging from the realities around you.

But what happens when divisive, potentially offensive messaging infiltrates that escape? Even with streaming services making it easy to watch TV commercial-free, it can still be difficult for TV viewers to avoid ads with these sorts of messages.

That’s especially the case with budget brands, which may even force controversial ads onto TVs when they’re idle, making users pay for low-priced TVs in unexpected, and sometimes troubling, ways.

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Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said he's keeping an eye on 23andMe's bankruptcy proceeding and the company's planned sale because of privacy concerns related to genetic testing data. 23andMe and its future owner must uphold the company's privacy promises, Ferguson said in a letter sent yesterday to representatives of the US Trustee Program , a Justice Department division that oversees administration of bankruptcy proceedings.

"As Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, I write to express the FTC's interests and concerns relating to the potential sale or transfer of millions of American consumers' sensitive personal information," Ferguson wrote. He continued:

As you may know, 23andMe collects and holds sensitive, immutable, identifiable personal information about millions of American consumers who have used the Company's genetic testing and telehealth services. This includes genetic information, biological DNA samples, health information, ancestry and genealogy information, personal contact information, payment and billing information, and other information, such as messages that genetic relatives can send each other through the platform.

23andMe's recent bankruptcy announcement set off a wave of concern about the fate of genetic data for its 15 million customers. The company said that "any buyer of 23andMe will be required to comply with our privacy policy and with all applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data." Many users reacted to the news by deleting their data , though tech problems apparently related to increased website traffic made that process difficult.

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As it flew up toward the International Space Station last summer, the Starliner spacecraft lost four thrusters. A NASA astronaut, Butch Wilmore, had to take manual control of the vehicle. But as its thrusters failed, Wilmore lost the ability to move Starliner in the direction he wanted to go.

He and his fellow astronaut, Suni Williams, knew where they wanted to go. Starliner had flown to within a stone's throw of the space station, a safe harbor if only they could reach it. But already, the failure of so many thrusters violated the mission's flight rules. In such an instance, they were supposed to turn around and come back to Earth. Approaching the station was deemed too risky for Wilmore and Williams, aboard Starliner, as well as the astronauts on the $100 billion space station.

But what if it was not safe to come home, either?

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It has been a bumpy start for Amazon's $280 Kindle Colorsoft , the company's first E-Ink book reader with a color screen. The company delayed shipments for a few weeks to correct a problem where a faint yellow band would appear across the bottom of the screen, something that has apparently been fixed for current versions of the reader (Amazon says it has made "the appropriate adjustments" to fix the problem but hasn't been specific about what those adjustments are).

Amazon didn't send us a Colorsoft for review at the time, maybe in part because of this problem early reviewers had, but we finally got one a few weeks ago and have been using it since then.

My main takeaway is that I don't mind the Colorsoft, but it also doesn't solve any problems I was having with the monochrome Kindle Paperwhite , and it doesn't meaningfully solve the big problems with color E-Ink. It also makes the experience of reading regular text subtly worse, which accounts for the vast majority of my Kindle activity. I'm curious to see future riffs on the idea, but this initial implementation leaves me cold.

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Google announced its intention to unify its generative AI efforts under the Gemini brand at the tail end of 2023, and it's been full steam ahead ever since. In 2025, Google Assistant is being phased out and replaced with Gemini . As Google, Amazon , and others move toward a world in which all virtual assistants are based on generative AI, it's reasonable to consider if this is actually a good idea. Despite promises of "smarter" AI and ever-increasing token limits, these robots still have a fundamental flaw that may make them bad Assistants: They lie.

They don't set out to lie, of course, because they don't know what a "lie" is. These systems attempt to generate the most plausible next token to build an output. Because of this, generative AI is non-deterministic—you can't predict the output, and even running the same prompt multiple times will offer varying responses.

This can look impressively like thinking sometimes, but it also leads to frequent hallucinations. That's why the iPhone said Luigi Mangione was dead and Google told people to put glue on pizza . GenAI proponents like Google and Apple have been trying to curb the chaos of confabulations , but this may always be a problem because of the nature of the underlying technology.

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Four adventurers suited up and embarked on a first-of-a-kind trip to space Monday night, becoming the first humans to fly in polar orbit aboard a SpaceX crew capsule chartered by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency billionaire.

The private astronauts rocketed into orbit atop a Falcon 9 booster from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:46 pm EDT Monday (01:46 UTC Tuesday). Instead of heading to the northeast in pursuit of the International Space Station, the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft departed Launch Complex 39A and arced to the southeast, then turned south on a flight path hugging Florida's east coast.

The unusual trajectory aligned the Falcon 9 with a perfectly polar orbit at an inclination of 90 degrees to the equator, bringing the four-person crew directly over the North or South Pole every 45 minutes.

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Google’s artificial intelligence arm DeepMind has been holding back the release of its world-renowned research, as it seeks to retain a competitive edge in the race to dominate the burgeoning AI industry.

The group, led by Nobel Prize-winner Sir Demis Hassabis, has introduced a tougher vetting process and more bureaucracy that made it harder to publish studies about its work on AI, according to seven current and former research scientists at Google DeepMind.

Three former researchers said the group was most reluctant to share papers that reveal innovations that could be exploited by competitors, or cast Google’s own Gemini AI model in a negative light compared with others.

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We're back! A long-time reader and subscriber recently mentioned in the Ars Forums that they "kind of" missed the Daily Telescope posts that I used to write in 2023 and 2024. Although I would have preferred that everyone desperately missed the Daily Telescope, I appreciate the sentiment. I really do.

I initially stopped writing these posts about a year ago because it just became too much to commit to writing one thing every day. I mean, I could have done it. But doing so on the daily crossed over the line from enjoyable to drudgery, and one of the best things about working for Ars is that it tends very much toward the enjoyable side. Anyway, writing one of these posts on a weekly basis feels more sustainable. I guess we'll find out!

Today's image comes to you all the way from Mars. One of the most powerful tools on NASA's Perseverance rover is the WATSON camera attached to the end of the rover's robotic arm. In the fine tradition of tortured acronyms at the space agency, WATSON stands for Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering. And because of course it is, WATSON is located on the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument. Seriously, NASA must stand for Not Another Screwball Acronym.

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What does it take to get OpenAI and Anthropic—two competitors in the AI assistant market—to get along? Despite a fundamental difference in direction that led Anthropic's founders to quit OpenAI in 2020 and later create the Claude AI assistant, a shared technical hurdle has now brought them together: How to easily connect their AI models to external data sources.

The solution comes from Anthropic, which developed and released an open specification called Model Context Protocol (MCP) in November 2024. MCP establishes a royalty-free protocol that allows AI models to connect with outside data sources and services without requiring unique integrations for each service.

"Think of MCP as a USB-C port for AI applications," wrote Anthropic in MCP's documentation. The analogy is imperfect, but it represents the idea that, similar to how USB-C unified various cables and ports (with admittedly a debatable level of success), MCP aims to standardize how AI models connect to the infoscape around them.

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