Two sibling contractors convicted a decade ago for hacking into US State Department systems have once again been charged, this time for a comically hamfisted attempt to steal and destroy government records just minutes after being fired from their contractor jobs. The Department of Justice on Thursday said that Muneeb Akhter and Sohaib Akhter, both 34, of Alexandria, Virginia, deleted databases and documents maintained and belonging to three government agencies….

Kohler is facing backlash after an engineer pointed out that the company’s new smart toilet cameras may not be as private as it wants people to believe. The discussion raises questions about Kohler’s use of the term “end-to-end encryption” (E2EE) and the inherent privacy limitations of a device that films the goings-on of a toilet bowl. In October, Kohler announced its first “health” product, the Dekoda. Kohler’s announcement described the…

OnePlus is ready to sell its new flagship smartphone in the US weeks after it made the device official. Having now finally gotten Federal Communications Commission clearance, the OnePlus 15 is available for preorder. It’s currently only live on the OnePlus storefront, but the device will eventually come to Amazon and Best Buy as well. The OnePlus 15 launched in China earlier this year, and it was supposed to go…

Security defenders are girding themselves in response to the disclosure of a maximum-severity vulnerability disclosed Wednesday in React Server, an open-source package that’s widely used by websites and in cloud environments. The vulnerability is easy to exploit and allows hackers to execute malicious code on servers that run it. Exploit code is now publicly available. React is embedded into web apps running on servers so that remote devices render JavaScript…

On Wednesday, Micron Technology announced it will exit the consumer RAM business in 2026, ending 29 years of selling RAM and SSDs to PC builders and enthusiasts under the Crucial brand. The company cited heavy demand from AI data centers as the reason for abandoning its consumer brand, a move that will remove one of the most recognizable names in the do-it-yourself PC upgrade market. “The AI-driven growth in the…

Microsoft has lowered sales growth targets for its AI agent products after many salespeople missed their quotas in the fiscal year ending in June, according to a report Wednesday from The Information. The adjustment is reportedly unusual for Microsoft, and it comes after the company missed a number of ambitious sales goals for its AI offerings. AI agents are specialized implementations of AI language models designed to perform multistep tasks…

Amazon Prime Video has scaled back an experiment that created laughable anime dubs with generative AI. In March, Amazon announced that its streaming service would start including “AI-aided dubbing on licensed movies and series that would not have been dubbed otherwise.” In late November, some AI-generated English and Spanish dubs of anime popped up, including dubs for the Banana Fish series and the movie No Game No Life: Zero. The…

The shoe is most certainly on the other foot. On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly declared a “code red” at the company to improve ChatGPT, delaying advertising plans and other products in the process,  The Information reported based on a leaked internal memo. The move follows Google’s release of its Gemini 3 model last month, which has outperformed ChatGPT on some industry benchmark tests and sparked high-profile praise on…

Streaming services have a way of reviving love for old shows, and HBO Max is looking to entice old and new fans with this month’s addition of Mad Men. Instead, viewers have been laughing at the problems with the show’s 4K premiere. Mad Men ran on the AMC channel for seven seasons from 2007 to 2015. The show had a vintage aesthetic, depicting the 1960s advertising industry in New York…

By Valve’s admission, its upcoming Steam Machine desktop isn’t swinging for the fences with its graphical performance. The specs promise decent 1080p-to-1440p performance in most games, with 4K occasionally reachable with assistance from FSR upscaling—about what you’d expect from a box with a modern midrange graphics card in it. But there’s one spec that has caused some concern among Ars staffers and others with their eyes on the Steam Machine:…