Jason Schreier, author of Play Nice, describes the rise and fall of Blizzard Entertainment, the massive sexual harassment scandal, and sweeping games industry layoffs.

Here’s the thing about asking investors for money: they want to see returns. OpenAI launched with a famously altruistic mission: to help humanity by developing artificial general intelligence. But along the way, it became one of the best-funded companies in Silicon Valley. Now, the tension between those two facts is coming to a head. Weeks after releasing a new model it claims can “reason,” OpenAI is barreling toward dropping its nonprofit status, some of its most senior employees are leaving, and CEO Sam Altman — who was once briefly ousted over apparent trust concerns — is solidifying his position as one of the most powerful people in tech. On Wednesday, OpenAI’s longtime chief technology officer, Mira Murati, announced she’s leaving...

The US Department of Justice has charged three Iranian nationals linked with a cyberattack against Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, according to an indictment on Friday. The three hackers, all of whom have ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, allegedly gained access to the accounts of campaign officials using social engineering and spear phishing, a tactic that attempts to trick victims into disclosing sensitive information. They then used the hijacked accounts to steal nonpublic campaign documents and emails, which they shared with the press. As outlined in the indictment, the US linked the hackers to an Iranian internet service provider, Respina Networks, which allegedly allowed them “unrestricted” internet access...

There's been a lot of AI news this week, and covering it sometimes feels like running through a hall full of danging CRTs, just like this Getty Images illustration. On Tuesday, Google announced updates to its Gemini model lineup, including the release of two new production-ready models that iterate on past releases: Gemini-1.5-Pro-002 and Gemini-1.5-Flash-002. The company reported improvements in overall quality, with notable gains in math, long context handling, and vision tasks. Google claims a 7 percent increase in performance on the MMLU-Pro benchmark and a 20 percent improvement in math-related tasks. But as you know, if you've been reading Ars Technica for a while, AI benchmarks aren't as useful as we would like them to be.

Tossing a can of soup at a priceless work of art will get you time in the slammer, apparently.

One of the jets emitted by galaxy M87's central black hole. The intense electromagnetic environment near a black hole can accelerate particles to a large fraction of the speed of light and sends the speeding particles along jets that extend from each of the object's poles. In the case of the supermassive black holes found in the center of galaxies, these jets are truly colossal, blasting material not just out of the galaxy, but possibly out of the galaxy's entire neighborhood. But this week, scientists have described how the jets may be doing some strange things inside of a galaxy, as well. A study of the galaxy M87 showed that nova explosions appear to be occurring at an unusual high frequency in the neighborhood of one of the jets from the galaxy's central black hole. But there's absolutely no mechanism to explain why this might happen, and there's no sign that it's happening at the jet that's traveling in the opposite direction. Whether this effect is real, and whether we can come up with an explanation for it, may take some further observations.

A warning sign outside a laboratory testing the H5N1 bird flu virus at The Pirbright Institute in Woking, UK, on Monday, March 13, 2023. More than a month after a person in Missouri mysteriously fell ill with H5-type bird flu, investigators in the state are still identifying people who became ill after contact with the patient, raising questions about the diligence of the ongoing health investigation. On September 6, Missouri's health department reported the state's first human case of H5-type bird flu, one that appears closely related to the H5N1 bird flu currently causing a nationwide outbreak among dairy cows. But the infected person had no known contact with infected animals—unlike all of the other 13 human cases identified amid the dairy outbreak this year. Those previous cases have all occurred in dairy- or poultry-farm workers. In fact, Missouri has not reported bird flu in its dairy herds nor recent poultry outbreaks. Given the unexplained source of infection, health investigators in the state have been working to track the virus both backward in time—to try to identify the source—and forward—to identify any potential onward spread. The bird flu patient was initially hospitalized on August 22 but recovered and had been released by the time the state publicly reported the case.

Contemporary fantasy television knows the fear of having a big, dark battle no one can see. But it turns out Rings of Power director Charlotte Brändström and cinematographer Alex Disenhof had a simple bit of advice for shooting the Siege of Eregion's night time scraps.

A truck full of lithium-ion batteries is burning in Los Angeles, shutting down ports and a bridge. It’s not clear what the batteries were for — but LA’s Vincent Thomas Bridge, leading to the Port of Los Angeles and the next-door Port of Long Beach, has been shut down for at least 15 hours now while local firefighters let the truck burn. State Route 47 was also closed in both directions as of a couple of hours ago. Amazingly, a local towing company caught the explosion on camera from a nearby drone: A post shared by Pepe's Tow Service Inc (@pepestowing) Both the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach have shut down a number of terminals while the fire continues to...

Meta is rolling out the ability to tag your location on your Threads posts. If you have the feature, you’ll see a pin in the post composer that you can tap so you can include where you are. Note that adding your location to a Threads post doesn’t share an exact pin on a map. Instead, the feature lets you give your users an approximate idea of your location by sharing things like a city name, a neighborhood, or a restaurant. And if you see a Threads post that includes a location, you can tap that location to see other posts from the same place. I have the feature, and I’ve been messing around with it. When I tap the pin in the post composer, Threads shows me a range of options: I can stay broad by tagging myself in Portland, OR, which is...

Enlarge Valve Corporation, tired of paying arbitration fees, has removed a mandatory arbitration clause from Steam's subscriber agreement. Valve told gamers in yesterday's update that they must sue the company in order to resolve disputes. The subscriber agreement includes "changes to how disputes and claims between you and Valve are resolved," Steam wrote in an email to users. "The updated dispute resolution provisions are in Section 10 and require all claims and disputes to proceed in court and not in arbitration. We've also removed the class action waiver and cost and fee-shifting provisions." The Steam agreement previously said that "you and Valve agree to resolve all disputes and claims between us in individual binding arbitration." Now, it says that any claims "shall be commenced and maintained exclusively in any state or federal court located in King County, Washington, having subject matter jurisdiction."