Californians are getting a new, supercharged way to stop data brokers from hoarding and selling their personal information, as a recently enacted law that’s among the strictest in the nation took effect at the beginning of the year. According to the California Privacy Protection Agency, more than 500 companies actively scour all sorts of sources for scraps of information about individuals, then package and store it to sell to marketers,…

Stewart Cheifet, the television producer and host who documented the personal computer revolution for nearly two decades on PBS, died on December 28, 2025, at age 87 in Philadelphia. Cheifet created and hosted Computer Chronicles, which ran on the public television network from 1983 to 2002 and helped demystify a new tech medium for millions of American viewers. Computer Chronicles covered everything from the earliest IBM PCs and Apple Macintosh…

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,…