Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards / Google DeepMind) On Wednesday, researchers at Google DeepMind revealed the first AI-powered robotic table tennis player capable of competing at an amateur human level. The system combines an industrial robot arm called the ABB IRB 1100 and custom AI software from DeepMind. While an expert human player can still defeat the bot, the system demonstrates the potential for machines to master complex physical tasks that…

Enlarge / A scene from Secret Invasion, a Disney+ exclusive. (credit: Marvel) Yesterday, The Walt Disney company announced it will soon raise prices for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. Today, it revealed that its streaming business has become profitable for the first time. So if Disney is starting to make money, why has it decided to jack up prices …again? Disney says it has “earned” higher prices On October 17, pricing…

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards / Getty Images) Over the past week, OpenAI experienced a significant leadership shake-up as three key figures announced major changes. Greg Brockman, the company’s president and co-founder, is taking an extended sabbatical until the end of the year, while another co-founder, John Schulman, permanently departed for rival Anthropic. Peter Deng, VP of Consumer Product, has also left the ChatGPT maker. In a post on X, Brockman…

Enlarge / The Mac’s Gatekeeper feature has been pushing developers to digitally sign their apps since it was introduced in 2012. (credit: Apple/Andrew Cunningham) It has always been easier to run third-party software on a Mac than on an iPhone or iPad. Despite the introduction of the Mac App Store a couple of years after the iPhone’s App Store opened, it has always been possible to download and run third-party…

This is Google’s new streaming box, the Google TV Streamer. It’s meant to sit on your media console instead of hanging from your TV’s USB port like the Chromecast. [credit: Google ] Google is discontinuing the Chromecast brand and pulling its Chromecast hardware off the market after 11 years, but it’s not leaving the streaming device business. Rather, it’s launching a new product called the Google TV Streamer that competes…

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Students in Singapore are scrambling after a security breach wiped notes and all other data from school-issued iPads and Chromebooks running the mobile device management app Mobile Guardian. According to news reports, the mass wiping came as a shock to multiple students in Singapore, where the Mobile Guardian app has been the country’s official mobile device management provider for public schools since 2020. Singapore’s Ministry of…

Enlarge / Apple Intelligence was unveiled at WWDC 2024. (credit: Apple) As the parent of a younger child, I can tell you that getting a kid to respond the way you want can require careful expectation-setting. Especially when we’re trying something new for the first time, I find that the more detail I can provide, the better he is able to anticipate events and roll with the punches. I bring…

Enlarge / Infrastructure! Howdy, Arsians! Last year, we partnered with IBM to host an in-person event in the Houston area where we all gathered together, had some cocktails, and talked about resiliency and the future of IT. Location always matters for things like this, and so we hosted it at Space Center Houston and had our cocktails amidst cool space artifacts. In addition to learning a bunch of neat stuff,…

Enlarge (credit: Marco Verch Professional Photographer and Speaker) Hackers delivered malware to Windows and Mac users by compromising their Internet service provider and then tampering with software updates delivered over unsecure connections, researchers said. The attack, researchers from security firm Volexity said, worked by hacking routers or similar types of device infrastructure of an unnamed ISP. The attackers then used their control of the devices to poison domain name system…

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) According to The Wall Street Journal, there’s internal conflict at OpenAI over whether or not to release a watermarking tool that would allow people to test text to see whether it was generated by ChatGPT or not. To deploy the tool, OpenAI would make tweaks to ChatGPT that would lead it to leave a trail in the text it generates that can be detected by a…