Anyone can now try Alexa+, Amazon’s generative AI assistant, through a free early access program at Alexa.com. The website frees the AI, which Amazon released via early access in February, from hardware and makes it as easily accessible as more established chatbots, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Until today, you needed a supporting device to access Alexa+. Amazon hasn’t said when the early access period will end, but when…

If you’ve been following our coverage for the last few years, you’ll already know that 2025 is the year that Windows 10 died. Technically. “Died,” because Microsoft’s formal end-of-support date came and went on October 14, as the company had been saying for years. “Technically,” because it’s trivial for home users to get another free year of security updates with a few minutes of effort, and schools and businesses can…

We’re far from streaming’s original promise: instant access to beloved and undiscovered titles without the burden of ads, bundled services, or price gouging that have long been associated with cable. Still, every year we get more dependent on streaming for entertainment. Despite streaming services’ flaws, many of us are bound to keep subscribing to at least one service next year. Here’s what we can expect in 2026 and beyond. Subscription…

In a roundup of the top stories of 2024, Ars included a supply-chain attack that came dangerously close to inflicting a catastrophe for thousands—possibly millions—of organizations, which included a large assortment of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. Supply-chain attacks played prominently again this year, as a seemingly unending rash of them hit organizations large and small. For threat actors, supply-chain attacks are the gift that keeps on giving—or, if…

Following two years of immense hype in 2023 and 2024, this year felt more like a settling-in period for the LLM-based token prediction industry. After more than two years of public fretting over AI models as future threats to human civilization or the seedlings of future gods, it’s starting to look like hype is giving way to pragmatism: Today’s AI can be very useful, but it’s also clearly imperfect and prone to mistakes….

Online fury erupted this week after an LG TV owner claimed that a firmware update installed unremovable generative AI software on their smart TV. The controversy began on Saturday, when a Reddit user posted about the sudden appearance of a Microsoft Copilot icon on their device (something Windows users are all too familiar with). The Reddit user claimed that a “new software update installed Copilot” onto their LG TV and…

At this point, most competitive online multiplayer games on the PC come with some kind of kernel-level anti-cheat software. As we’ve written before, this is software that runs with more elevated privileges than most other apps and games you run on your PC, allowing it to load in earlier and detect advanced methods of cheating. More recently, anti-cheat software has started to require more Windows security features like Secure Boot,…

Google is generally happy to see people using generative AI tools to create content, and it’s doubly happy when they publish it on its platforms. But there are limits to everything. Two YouTube channels that attracted millions of subscribers with AI-generated movie trailers have been shuttered. Screen Culture and KH Studio flooded the site with fake but often believable trailers. The channels, which had a combined audience of more than…

Peacock subscribers will see ads immediately upon opening the streaming app or website next year. It’s a bold new strategy for attracting advertisers—something that’s been increasingly important to subscription-based streaming services—but it also risks alienating viewers As reported by Variety, the new type of ads will display on the profile selection page that shows when a subscriber launches Peacock. Starting next year, instead of the profile page just showing your…

For most of photography’s roughly 200-year history, altering a photo convincingly required either a darkroom, some Photoshop expertise, or, at minimum, a steady hand with scissors and glue. On Tuesday, OpenAI released a tool that reduces the process to typing a sentence. It’s not the first company to do so. While OpenAI had a conversational image-editing model in the works since GPT-4o in 2024, Google beat OpenAI to market in…