A messaging service used by former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has temporarily shut down while the company investigates an apparent hack. The messaging app is used to access and archive Signal messages, but is not made by Signal itself.

404 Media reported yesterday that a hacker stole data "from TeleMessage, an obscure Israeli company that sells modified versions of Signal and other messaging apps to the US government to archive messages." 404 Media interviewed the hacker and reported that the data stolen "contains the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent using [TeleMessage's] Signal clone, as well as modified versions of WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat."

TeleMessage is based in Israel and was acquired in February 2024 by Smarsh, a company headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Smarsh provided a statement to Ars today saying it has temporarily shut down all TeleMessage services.

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On Monday, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI announced it will remain under the control of its founding nonprofit board, scrapping its controversial plan to split off its commercial operations as a for-profit company after mounting pressure from critics.

In an official OpenAI blog post announcing the latest restructuring decision, CEO Sam Altman wrote: "We made the decision for the nonprofit to stay in control after hearing from civic leaders and having discussions with the offices of the Attorneys General of California and Delaware."

The move represents a significant shift in OpenAI's proposed restructuring. While the most recent previous version of the company's plan (which we covered in December) would have established OpenAI as a Public Benefit Corporation with the nonprofit merely holding shares and having limited influence, the revised approach keeps the nonprofit firmly in control of operations.

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Google's accelerated Android release cycle will soon deliver a new version of the software, and it might look quite different from what you'd expect. Amid rumors of a major UI overhaul, Google seems to have accidentally published a blog post detailing "Material 3 Expressive," which we expect to see revealed at I/O later this month. Google quickly removed the post from its design site, but not before the Internet Archive saved it .

It has been a few years since Google introduced any major changes to its Material theming , but the design team wasn't just sitting idly this whole time. According to the leaked blog post, Google has spent the past three years working on a more emotionally engaging vision for Android design. While the original Material Design did an admirable job of leveraging colors and consistent theming, it could make apps look too similar. The answer to that, apparently, is Material 3 Expressive.

Google says this is "the most-researched update to Google’s design system, ever." The effort reportedly included 46 separate studies with hundreds of sample designs. The team showed these designs to more than 18,000 study participants to understand how the user experience would work. In these studies, the design team used a variety of metrics, including the following:

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Hundreds of e-commerce sites, at least one owned by a large multinational company, were backdoored by malware that executes malicious code inside the browsers of visitors, where it can steal payment card information and other sensitive data, security researchers said Monday.

The infections are the result of a supply-chain attack that compromised at least three software providers with malware that remained dormant for six years and became active only in the last few weeks. At least 500 e-commerce sites that rely on the backdoored software were infected, and it’s possible that the true number is double that, researchers from security firm Sansec said .

Among the compromised customers was a $40 billion multinational company, which Sansec didn’t name. In an email Monday, a Sansec representative said that “global remediation [on the infected customers] remains limited.”

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In 2022, we told you about a study reporting evidence that an ancient Peruvian people called the Wari laced the beer served at their feasts with hallucinogens—particularly a substance derived from the seeds of the vilca tree, which was common in the region during the Middle Horizon period (circa 850 CE) when the Wari empire thrived. This may have helped the Wari forge political alliances and expand their empire.

Now archaeologists have discovered direct evidence that the use of vilca was a common practice some 1,000 years earlier than the Wari, thanks to analysis of artifacts unearthed at Chavín de Huántar, located about 250 kilometers north of Lima, Peru. And the Chavín people may have used it for a different purpose: to reinforce social hierarchies by limiting consumption of those substances to an elite few, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

There is ample evidence that humans in many cultures throughout history used various hallucinogenic substances in religious ceremonies or shamanic rituals. That includes ancient Egypt , as well as ancient Greek, Vedic, Maya , Inca, and Aztec cultures. The Urarina people who live in the Peruvian Amazon Basin still use a psychoactive brew called ayahuasca in their rituals, and Westerners seeking their own brand of enlightenment have been known to participate. The Wari empire lasted from around 500 CE to 1100 CE in the central highlands of Peru.

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Today is the day: Microsoft has formally shuttered the Skype app and service after announcing in February that Skype was being axed in favor of Microsoft Teams, the company's Slack competitor.

The Skype apps have all been advertising the end of the service and pointing users to Teams for weeks now. As of today, if you open the app or navigate to the Skype site , you'll be directed to use Teams instead. The last active vestige of Skype is the Skype Dial Pad , which Skype subscribers and members with Skype Credits can still use to make calls to traditional telephone numbers (the Dial Pad is also incorporated into Microsoft Teams Free ).

It's an unceremonious end for an app that was once synonymous with video calls. Microsoft originally bought Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011 ; it was also owned by eBay from 2005 to 2009 and by a group of venture capital firms between 2009 and 2011. Ironically, Microsoft bought the app to replace its own first-party communication client at the time, Windows Live Messenger (which itself had grown out of the old MSN Messenger).

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Earlier this year, we took a look at how and why Anthropic's Claude LLM was struggling to beat Pokémon Red (a game, let's remember, designed for young children). But while Claude 3.7 is still struggling to make consistent progress at the game weeks later, a similar Twitch-streamed effort using Google's Gemini 2.5 model managed to finally complete Pokémon Blue this weekend across over 106,000 in-game actions, earning accolades from followers, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai .

Before you start using this achievement as a way to compare the relative performance of these two AI models—or even the advancement of LLM capabilities over time—there are some important caveats to keep in mind. As it happens, Gemini needed some fairly significant outside help on its path to eventual Pokémon victory.

Strap in to the agent harness

Gemini Plays Pokémon developer JoelZ (who's unaffiliated with Google) will be the first to tell you that Pokémon is ill-suited as a reliable benchmark for LLM models. As he writes on the project's Twitch FAQ , "please don't consider this a benchmark for how well an LLM can play Pokémon. You can't really make direct comparisons—Gemini and Claude have different tools and receive different information. ... Claude's framework has many shortcomings so I wanted to see how far Gemini could get if it were given the right tools."

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The Trump administration filed an emergency application on Friday asking the Supreme Court to restore DOGE's access to Social Security Administration records. A lower-court order that prohibited DOGE's access is causing "irreparable harm to the executive branch" and thwarting DOGE's attempts to "eliminate waste and fraud," US Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in the appeal .

"The government cannot eliminate waste and fraud if district courts bar the very agency personnel with expertise and the designated mission of curtailing such waste and fraud from performing their jobs," Sauer told the Supreme Court. The preliminary injunction that is currently in place halted "the Executive Branch's critically important efforts to improve its information-technology infrastructure and eliminate waste," the brief said.

The appeal was lodged in a case filed by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the Alliance for Retired Americans; and American Federation of Teachers. Chief Justice John Roberts asked them to file a response to the US by May 12.

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An update to Roku OS has resulted in colors looking washed out in HDR content viewed on Roku apps, like Disney+.

Complaints started surfacing on Roku's community forum a week ago. On May 1, a company representative posted that Roku was “investigating the Disney Plus HDR content that was washed out after the recent update.” However, based on user feedback, it seems that HDR on additional Roku apps, including Apple TV+ and Netflix, are also affected. Roku’s representative has been asking users to share their experiences so that Roku can dig deeper into the problem.

One user, going by "Squinky" on the forum, reported having a TCL TV with the problem and shared the following photo comparison:

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