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      Google announces Gemini 3.5 Live Translate for instant voice-to-voice translation

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 days ago • 1 minute

    Google has been chasing real-time translation for years, which it says has been one of its "pioneering machine learning experiments." We've seen numerous demos on stage at Google events in the past, but you needed Google phones, earbuds, or some other specific setup. Last year, Google brought real-time translation to more users in the Translate app, and now it's expanding availability more. With the release of Gemini 3.5 Live Translate, you'll have access to instant translation in more places and with lower latency than ever before.

    The new AI model is part of the version 3.5 family that launched at I/O . Before today, Google had only rolled out the Flash version, but we're expecting a Pro model to drop in the coming weeks. Gemini 3.5 Live Translate is a speech-to-speech model tuned to automatically detect and translate in more than 70 languages.

    Google says Gemini 3.5 Live Translate is fast enough to keep up with a normal conversation, following just a few seconds behind the speaker while also matching intonation, pacing, and pitch. In short, the voice sounds more like you than a generic robot. The demos, which are all being recorded under controlled conditions, do sound impressive. You won't have to wait long to verify the model's abilities for yourself, though.

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      NASA assigns crew for Artemis III, sets aggressive timeline for flying it

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 days ago

    The US space agency unveiled the crew for its Artemis III mission on Tuesday during an enthusiastic event at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

    For this spaceflight into low-Earth orbit, which will see the Orion spacecraft rendezvous and dock with lunar lander prototypes, NASA chose an experienced, all-male crew with military backgrounds. They were revealed inside a darkened Teague Auditorium where hundreds of friends, family members, and NASA employees cheered enthusiastically.

    The four crew members are:

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      Screwworms in US: Human risk is low—but they can burrow through your skull

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 days ago

    Ravenous, flesh-eating flies have busted through containment barriers and have now reemerged in the US . On Monday and Tuesday, the US Department of Agriculture reported three new cases, bringing the tally to five.

    One of the cases is in a dog, though it's unclear where it became infected; the dog lives in New Mexico , had its infection reported in Texas, and may have recently traveled to Mexico , where the flies are also spreading. But the other four US cases were all in Texas—and all in calves— two in Zavala County and two in La Salle County .

    Almost all the attention over screwworm's resurgence has focused on the threat to livestock, like the calves and, in turn, the financial risk to the cattle industry. The fly's voracious, screw-shaped larvae can fell cattle if given the chance, and preventing infestations requires intense vigilance. The USDA has estimated that if the flies stage a comeback rivaling isolated outbreaks of the past, they could cost Texas producers $732 million per year and the Texas economy $1.8 billion.

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      One day after discovery, Meta pulls facial recognition code from its smart glasses

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 days ago

    One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code.

    The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses , strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called NameTag. The version published the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them.

    Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, told WIRED on Monday that the feature is purely exploratory, adding: “No final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”

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      US military claims first drone boat rescue of downed helicopter crew

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 days ago

    A drone boat picked up two US Army pilots from waters near the Strait of Hormuz after their helicopter gunship went down, US military officials said in interviews with various broadcast news outlets. The incident apparently represents the first time the US military has used a drone for such a rescue mission at sea.

    The two crew members from the US Army AH-64 Apache were “rescued by American forces” at 7:33 pm US Eastern Time after their helicopter went down off the coast of Oman on June 8, according to a US Central Command press release . That press release mentioned support from US Navy units including the US 5th Fleet’s Task Force 59 , which is charged with integrating uncrewed aerial, surface, and underwater vehicles, alongside AI, into 5th Fleet maritime operations.

    Anonymous US military officials told CBS News that the Apache air crew was rescued by an uncrewed surface drone operated by Task Force 59 from the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. The officials also described the incident as the first time the military had used a drone to rescue people from the water.

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      High-severity vulnerability in Linux caused by a single errant character

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 days ago

    Researchers have analyzed a high-severity vulnerability in Linux that’s able to escalate untrusted users to root by exploiting a bug you don't often see: a single errant character inside the kernel.

    The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-23111 , is located in nf_tables, a subsystem of the Linux kernel that provides packet filtering capabilities. It’s used to manage firewall rules and replaces older subsystems such as iptables, ip6tables, arptables, and ebtables.

    !!!WTF!!!

    The presence of a single mis-issued exclamation point in code implementing nf_tables introduced a use-after-free, a class of vulnerability that corrupts memory by placing malicious code at memory addresses that haven’t been properly freed of their previous contents. CVE-2026-23111 can be exploited by an unprivileged user or process to elevate system rights to root.

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      Gold isn’t inert, it just has bodyguards protecting it

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 days ago

    Gold is weird. It's one of the few metals that doesn’t really oxidize. Even silver and copper—from the same column of the periodic table—form weak oxides. Naively, you might expect that gold would tarnish just like silver. Gold also sits right next to platinum, but it has none of that metal’s catalytic properties.

    Then came gold nanoparticles that acted like catalysts, and we were confused by their apparent willingness to take part in chemical reactions.

    Now, a pair of scientists has explained that gold’s inertness isn’t inherent to the atom but rather to the surfaces that gold crystals form. Before we get to the results, let’s first take a look at the traditional explanation for gold’s inertness and why an inert material that has no catalytic activity suddenly acts as a catalyst when in its nanoparticle form.

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      Here's Audi's next Q7 SUV and US-only SQ7, now with an RS V8

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 days ago • 1 minute

    Audi provided flights from Washington, DC, to Munich, Germany, and accommodation so Ars could see the Q7, as well as the Q9. We also drove the new RS5. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

    MUNICH, GERMANY—Audi is having a bit of an SUV renaissance lately. Over the past 18 months, it has brought out a new electric Q6 and replaced the midsize Q5 , and later this summer we'll get to see the Q9 , a full-size leviathan with the Escalade in its sights. But today it's the turn of an all-new version of the Q7, and the North America-only SQ7, both of which go on sale later this year for model year 2027.

    The standard Q7 will come to the US with a twin-turbo 2.9 L V6 that generates 429 hp (320 kW) and 442 lb-ft (600 Nm). Meanwhile, the SQ7 borrows the 591 hp (441 kW), 590 lb-ft (800 Nm) V8 as found under the hood of the RS7 . But there's no plug-in hybrid version slated as far as we know.

    Both models use an eight-speed automatic transmission (ZF's very capable 8HP) and all-wheel drive. Audi says these are the quickest-accelerating Q7 and SQ7s it has made, and it also says they should be much better to drive, too. Standard Q7s will ride on steel springs or can option the adaptive air suspension that's standard on the SQ7—this gets an optional third mode that lowers the car by more than an inch (30 mm).

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      Apple says its AI is still private, even when it's running on Google's servers

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 days ago • 1 minute

    CUPERTINO, California—Apple announced earlier this year that its long-delayed Siri upgrade, announced this week as "Siri AI," would use Google's Gemini language models . What the company confirmed at its Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday was that it also ran on Nvidia hardware installed in Google servers. But the company is still making the same privacy promises it did before, when all of its AI models were either running locally on your devices or on Apple-controlled server hardware.

    For years, Apple has touted user privacy as a key benefit of using its platforms. Its cloud services use encryption that's intended to keep other people—including Apple employees—from being able to gain access to it. And the company has long advertised its use of on-device processing for things like scanning images, keeping as much data as possible from leaving your device in the first place.

    But with Apple Intelligence, Apple has run up against the limits of its own hardware. The kinds of language and reasoning models that can run locally on an iPhone or Mac are relatively small, limiting their capabilities and accuracy. Apple's Private Cloud Compute system was a partial solution but relied on Apple's own server hardware; to get the kind of capacity it would need to support Siri AI, Apple would have had to commit to a huge data center buildout that it has so far avoided .

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