China’s new clampdown on drone sales and even the storage of drone components within the capital of Beijing stands out in a country that effectively built the global market for affordable commercial drones. The unprecedented citywide rules taking effect on May 1 come as authorities tighten drone regulations across the country and enforce flight restrictions more strictly.

Chinese officials are refining drone regulations because “enforcement and rules have been uneven or unclear,” said Lizzi C. Lee , a fellow on the Chinese economy at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis in New York City. Now it appears that Beijing officials are “experimenting with a more comprehensive, front-end approach” by implementing the citywide ban on drone sales and rentals—not to mention restricting the storage of drones and drone components within the city.

“What’s pretty notable here is that this is not just about regulating use but also about controlling the entire lifecycle—sales, transport, and storage—of drones,” Lee told Ars. “That’s a much more preventive, system-level approach to eliminating unauthorized drone activity rather than just policing them after the fact.”

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After some uncertainty—and a little drama—the Trump administration is appealing a ruling by a judge last month that temporarily halted anti-vaccine changes Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy had implemented at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those changes include filling a key vaccine advisory panel with dubious anti-vaccine allies and unilaterally slashing childhood vaccine recommendations.

On March 16, US District Judge Brian Murphy issued a temporary injunction on those changes, essentially blocking the appointment of Kennedy's advisors, nullifying all votes they made on federal vaccine policy, and undoing the changes to the CDC childhood vaccination schedule. Murphy ruled that Kennedy's advisors were unqualified, and their appointment and the changes to vaccine recommendations violated federal procedures. The ruling stems from a case brought against Kennedy and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

Prior to the ruling, lawyers for the government argued that Kennedy's actions were " unreviewable " and his authority was such that he could advise Americans to actively inject themselves with measles virus rather than the vaccine if he wanted. Murphy rejected that argument in his ruling and found the AAP would likely succeed with their claim that Kennedy's changes were illegal.

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Since the introduction of wings to racing cars halfway through the 1960s, airflow has been everything in racing. Until that point, the focus was on making a car as slippery as possible; less drag meant more top speed on the straights. Then designers like Jim Hall at Chaparral and Colin Chapman at Lotus realized they could use the air to push the car onto the track , increasing grip and allowing it to go faster through the corners. Things haven't been the same since.

Finding aerodynamic downforce started as something of a dark art. The use of wind tunnels to simulate its effect on scale models of cars was in its infancy, so teams were mostly limited to expensive and sometimes dangerous track testing. But wind tunnels can run day and night, rain or shine, and you can't crash a car or injure a driver (or worse) in the process. Wind tunnel work became even more important when F1 began restricting on-track testing to help teams cut budgets. Consequently, teams would do as much work with models as possible before validating the results during the limited test sessions they were allowed.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation came next. In racing, everyone is looking for an advantage over their competitors, and it was finally possible to model, with some fidelity, the effect of airflow on a virtual model of a car. Not only were CFD sims cheaper than wind tunnel time, but they were also much faster at iterating. Early design work is now done in silico before being validated with scale models in a wind tunnel, as most series—including Formula 1, the World Endurance Championship, Formula E, and NASCAR—have tightly restricted on-track testing.

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Several times in the last couple of decades, Microsoft has released source code for the original MS-DOS operating system that kicked off its decades-long dominance of consumer PCs. This week, the company has reached further back than ever , releasing "the earliest DOS source code discovered to date" along with other documentation and notes from its developer.

Today's source release is so old that it predates the MS-DOS branding, and it includes "sources to the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, several development snapshots of the PC-DOS 1.00 kernel, and some well-known utilities such as CHKDSK ," write Microsoft's Stacey Haffner and Scott Hanselman in their co-authored post about the release.

To understand the context, here's a very brief history of what would become MS-DOS: Programmer Tim Paterson originally created 86-DOS (previously known as QDOS, for "quick and dirty operating system") for an Intel 8086-based computer kit sold by Seattle Computer Products. Microsoft, on the hook to provide an operating system for the still-in-development IBM PC 5150 , licensed 86-DOS and hired Paterson to continue developing it, later buying the rights to 86-DOS outright. Microsoft then licensed this operating system to IBM as PC-DOS while retaining the ability to sell the operating system to other companies. The version sold by Microsoft was called MS-DOS, and the proliferation of third-party IBM PC clones over the '80s and '90s made it the version of the operating system that most people ended up using.

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More than half of “long-shot” bets on military action made on Polymarket are successful, according to a new report that suggests prediction markets could pose a bigger threat than previously recognised to the security of sensitive information.

Analysis by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a non-profit research and advocacy group, found that long-shot bets—defined as wagers of $2,500 or more at odds of 35 percent or less—on the platform had an average win rate of around 52 percent in markets on military and defence actions.

That compares with a win rate of 25 percent across all politics-focused markets and just 14 percent for all markets on the platform as a whole.

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' plans to upend childhood vaccination requirements continues to be thwarted by his fellow Republicans.

Just minutes into a special session on Tuesday, Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez announced that the Republican-led chamber would not take up a proposal from DeSantis to allow children to opt out of certain school vaccination requirements. The move effectively killed the proposal, which had been backed by the Senate.

Perez, a father from Miami with three young children, said he was concerned by the idea of "children being in school without measles and mumps and polio and chickenpox vaccines that have been working for decades," according to The New York Times , which reported from the State Capitol. "That was something that I was uncomfortable with."

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Many people are hoping—nay, praying— that the potential AI bubble will burst soon.

But to hear Google tell it, generative AI is the future, and the company's products have to change to keep up with the technical reality. As a result, Gemini is seeping into every nook and cranny of the Google ecosystem. Generative AI feeds on data, and Google has a lot of your data in products like Gmail and Drive. What does that mean for your privacy, and what happens if you don't want Gemini peeking over your shoulder? Well, it's kind of a mess.

The amount of data Gemini retains depends on how you access the AI, and opting out of data collection can mean running straight into so-called " dark patterns ," UI elements that work against the user's interest.

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Disney will have the law on its side in its fight against the unusual broadcast license review ordered yesterday by the Federal Communications Commission, legal experts say.

In 1996, Congress made it a lot harder for the FCC to take away a broadcast license, even when it's up for renewal. "Since the NAB [National Association of Broadcasters] got an amendment in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, denying renewal to a broadcaster faces an almost insurmountable burden," Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior counselor of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, told Ars this week.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was a major update to the Communications Act, the 1934 law that established the FCC and provides the agency with its legal authority.

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The system prompt for OpenAI's Codex CLI contains a perplexing and repeated warning for the most recent GPT model to "never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query."

The explicit operational warning was made public last week as part of the latest open source code for Codex CLI that OpenAI posted on GitHub . The prohibition is repeated twice in a 3,500-plus word set of "base instructions" for the recently released GPT-5.5, alongside more anodyne reminders not to "use emojis or em dashes unless explicitly instructed" and to "never use destructive commands like 'git reset --hard' or 'git checkout --' unless the user has clearly asked for that operation."

Separate system prompt instructions for earlier models contained in the same JSON file do not contain the specific prohibition against mentioning goblins and other creatures, suggesting OpenAI is fighting a new problem that has popped up in its latest model release. Anecdotal evidence on social media shows some users complaining about GPT's penchant for focusing on goblins in completely unrelated conversations in recent days.

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