Following last year's Tesla shareholder vote, CEO Elon Musk's near-incomprehensible wealth is now inextricably linked in part to the number of active "FSD" subscriptions his electric car company can sign up. And last month, the Dutch vehicle regulator RDW made that a little easier by approving FSD for use on its roads. Now, the RDW will ask the rest of the European Union to follow suit, opening up a new market of 450 million potential new customers for the driver assist. But it's no foregone conclusion: Tesla faces plenty of skepticism from other European regulators, according to a report published today by Reuters .

Among the goals Musk must meet if he wants all 423.7 million shares in his new contract—current market value $1.7 trillion: Over the next decade Tesla needs at least 10 million subs on the hook. Those kinds of numbers are unachievable if he has to rely just on North American users; Tesla needs Europe and China to say yes, too.

But neither China nor the EU have quite the same attitude toward consumer safety that we do in the US, where our government has decided to implicitly trust companies like Tesla at their word when they say a new product is safe. Instead, Chinese and European regulators require premarket approval before letting something loose on their roads.

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The Department of Homeland Security tried to obtain a Canadian man’s location information, activity logs, and other identifying information from Google after he criticized the Trump administration online following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis early this year.

Lawyers for the man, who has not been named, are alarmed in part because they say that the man has not entered the United States in more than a decade. “I don’t know what the government knows about our client’s residence, but it’s clear that the government isn’t stopping to find out,” says Michael Perloff, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia who is representing the man in a lawsuit against Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of DHS, over the summons. The lawsuit alleges that DHS violated the customs law that gives the agency the power to request records from businesses and other parties.

Perloff argues that the government is using the fact that big tech companies are based in the US to request information it would not otherwise be able to get. “It’s using that geographic fact to get information that otherwise would be totally outside of its jurisdiction,” he says. “I mean, we’re talking about the physical movements of a person who lives in Canada.”

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I've recently developed a daily habit—perhaps one I should cut back on—of visiting several subreddits to keep up on things like audio production and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But I was surprised this weekend to suddenly find myself cut off; Reddit simply would not let me visit the site on my mobile phone.

Instead, a new overlay popped up, saying, "Get the app to keep using Reddit."

There was no way to skip, bypass, or close the overlay. It did not provide any instructions or alternatives for continuing to use the mobile web version. What it did offer was a large button I could press to get the app. If I did so, the overlay told me, I would be able to "search better" and "personalize your feed"—two things I don't care to do.

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As its name implies, the venerable Notepad++ text editor began as a more capable version of the classic Windows Notepad, with features such as line numbering and syntax highlighting. It was created in 2003 by Don Ho, who continues to be its primary author and maintainer, and it has been a Windows-exclusive app throughout its existence (older Notepad++ versions support OSes as old as Windows 95; the current version officially supports everything going back to Windows 7).

I'm not a devoted user of the app, but I was aware of its history, which is why I was surprised to see news of a "Notepad++ for Mac" port making the rounds last week , as though it were a port of the original available from the Notepad++ website.

Apparently, this news surprised Ho as well, who claims that the Mac version and its author, Andrey Letov , are "using the Notepad++ trademark (the name) without permission."

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In a world awash in high-tech security tools like passkeys, quantum-safe algorithms, and public-key cryptography, it can be refreshing to get back to the simple things... like a good old-fashioned canary trap.

The canary trap is a simple tool often used to identify leakers or double agents. To make one, you simply share a document, image, or database but make tiny changes that are unique to each recipient. That way, if those changes show up verbatim in any leak of the information, you know immediately which recipient was behind the leak.

You don't often see canary traps in the news, though they have long been a staple of spy fiction (and practice), so an account out of Canada last week caught my eye.

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A study that claimed OpenAI’s ChatGPT can positively impact student learning has been retracted nearly one year after publication. The journal publisher, Springer Nature, cited “discrepancies” in the analysis and a lack of confidence in the conclusions—but not before the paper racked up hundreds of citations and made the rounds on social media.

“The paper's authors made some very attention-grabbing claims about the benefits of ChatGPT on learning outcomes,” said Ben Williamson , a senior lecturer at the Centre for Research in Digital Education and the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, in an email to Ars. “It was treated by many on social media as one of the first pieces of hard, gold standard evidence that ChatGPT, and generative AI more broadly, benefits learners.”

The retracted paper attempted to quantify “the effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking” by analyzing results from 51 previous research studies. Its meta-analysis calculated the effect size between various studies’ experimental groups that used ChatGPT in education and control groups that did not use the AI chatbot.

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GameStop yesterday made an unsolicited offer to buy eBay for $55.5 billion. GameStop claims that eBay has underperformed and spends too much on sales and marketing and argues that it would become a stronger company if it cuts costs and is combined with GameStop's physical retail locations.

"GameStop’s ~1,600 US locations give eBay a national network for authentication, intake, fulfillment, and live commerce," GameStop Chairman and CEO Ryan Cohen wrote in a letter to eBay Chairman Paul Pressler.

eBay's market capitalization is over four times larger than GameStop's. GameStop faces skepticism about the viability of its offer but says it will obtain debt financing and pay with a mix of cash and stock.

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After an unanticipated five-week break in the season, Formula One resumed action this past weekend in Miami. Held at a temporary circuit around Hard Rock Stadium, the event is emblematic of the Liberty era of F1: a turbocharged marketing extravaganza crammed full of hospitality suites with ticket prices as high as $95,000 . It might be miles from the sea—the original plans to race across a bridge over Biscayne Bay did not survive contact with locals—but the sport is doing its best to make this a modern Monaco, playing up the host city's glamorous reputation and pastel color palette.

As we learned a couple of weeks ago , there have been tweaks to the amount of energy that the cars' new hybrid power units can regenerate and deploy via the electric motor that contributes almost half of the car's power output. The first three races of this season were frenetic , but they alarmed many longtime fans, as the cars are now too energy-limited to be driven flat-out during qualifying; that energy limitation also led to cars swapping positions multiple times, derisively dubbed "yo-yo" racing by critics.

The new limits on harvesting energy from the V6 to charge the battery on the move should reduce the potential for huge speed differentials like the one that caused Oliver Bearman's crash in Japan, and energy management was (thankfully) not much of a topic this weekend. Miami's layout definitely helps there, with plenty of braking zones to help regenerate much of the now-allowed 7 MJ each lap.

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Last year, we noted how the long-standing vagaries of HDMI licensing and open source AMD driver development combined to prevent the upcoming Steam Machine from receiving official support for the HDMI 2.1 display standard . Now, though, it seems that AMD is making real progress on adding full HDMI 2.1 compliance to its Linux amdgpu driver in the near future.

In patch series notes for an amdgpu driver update posted on Friday (and noticed by Phoronix ), AMD's Harry Wentland says that the company is finally adding HDMI FRL (Fixed Rate Link) support to the popular Linux display driver. That's the feature that allows for higher bandwidth on compatible HDMI cables compared to the TMDS standard found on HDMI 2.0 and earlier. That in turn enables direct support for higher resolutions, dynamic HDR, and features like Variable Refresh Rate that aren't supported in HDMI 2.0.

Wentland notes that this update still just represents "a representative subset of HDMI compliance," in part because it is missing the code to support the Display Stream Compression (DSC) that allows for even higher resolutions and frame rates up to 10K at 100 Hz. But Wentland adds that DSC support "is still being tested and will be sent out later," and that "a full
compliance run" for HDMI 2.1 is "in the works." An AMD driver developer with the handle agd5f also commented on Phoronix , noting that "a full implementation [of HDMI 2.1] will ultimately be available once the patches are ready and have completed compliance testing."

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