Pairing Bluetooth devices can be a pain, but Google Fast Pair makes it almost seamless. Unfortunately, it may also leave your headphones vulnerable to remote hacking. A team of security researchers from Belgium’s KU Leuven University has revealed a vulnerability dubbed WhisperPair that allows an attacker to hijack Fast Pair-enabled devices to spy on the owner.

Fast Pair is widely used, and your device may be vulnerable even if you've never used a Google product. The bug affects more than a dozen devices from 10 manufacturers, including Sony, Nothing, JBL, OnePlus, and Google itself. Google has acknowledged the flaw and notified its partners of the danger, but it's up to these individual companies to create patches for their accessories. A full list of vulnerable devices is available on the project's website .

The researchers say that it takes only a moment to gain control of a vulnerable Fast Pair device (a median of just 10 seconds) at ranges up to 14 meters. That's near the limit of the Bluetooth protocol and far enough that the target wouldn't notice anyone skulking around while they hack headphones.

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A PC mod that added online gameplay to Rockstar's 2006 school-exploration title Bully was abruptly taken down on Wednesday, roughly a month after it was first made available. While the specific reason for the "Bully Online" takedown hasn't been publicly discussed, a message posted by the developers to the project's now-defunct Discord server clarifies that "this was not something we wanted."

The Bully Online mod was spearheaded by Swegta, a Rockstar-focused YouTuber who formally announced the project in October as a mod that "allows you and your friends to play minigames, role-play, compete in racing, fend off against NPCs, and much more."

At the time of the announcement, Swegta said the mod was "a project me and my team have been working on for a very long time" and that early access in December would be limited to those who contributed at least $8 to a Ko-Fi account. When December actually rolled around, though, a message on Swegta.com ( archived ) suggested that the mod was being released freely as an open source project, with a registration page ( archived ) offering new accounts to anyone.

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On Thursday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced licensing deals with Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI, expanding its effort to charge major tech companies for using Wikipedia content to train the AI models that power AI assistants like Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI's ChatGPT.

While these same companies previously scraped Wikipedia without permission, the deals mean that most major AI developers have now signed on to the foundation's Wikimedia Enterprise program, a commercial subsidiary that sells API access to Wikipedia's 65 million articles at higher speeds and volumes than the free public APIs provide. The foundation did not disclose the financial terms of the deals.

The new partners join Google, which signed a deal with Wikimedia Enterprise in 2022, as well as smaller companies like Ecosia, Nomic, Pleias, ProRata, and Reef Media. The revenue helps offset infrastructure costs for the nonprofit, which otherwise relies on small public donations while watching its content become a staple of training data for AI models.

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In remarks this week to a Texas space organization, a key Senate staff member said an "extension" of the International Space Station is on the table and that NASA needs to accelerate a program to replace the aging station with commercial alternatives.

Maddy Davis, a space policy staff member for US Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, made the comments to the Texas Space Coalition during a virtual event.

Cruz is chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and has an outsized say in space policy. As a senator from Texas, he has a parochial interest in Johnson Space Center, where the International Space Station Program is led.

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US President Donald Trump has announced new tariffs on Nvidia and AMD as part of a novel scheme to enact a deal with the technology giants to take a 25 percent cut of sales of their AI processors to China.

In December, the White House said it would allow Nvidia to start shipping its H200 chips to China, reversing a policy that prohibited the export of advanced AI hardware. However, it demanded a 25 percent cut of the sales.

The new US tariffs on certain chips, announced on Wednesday, were designed to implement these payments and protect the unusual arrangement from legal challenges, according to several industry executives.

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Polestar provided flights from Los Angeles to Milan and accommodation so Ars could participate in the Green Mille Miglia. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

On the first day of this year’s Mille Miglia, a voice rose from the crowds gathered on the shore of Lago di Garda to shout “no sound, no feeling!”at my Polestar 3. Italians love their cars, and they revealed a clear preference for internal combustion engines over the next four days and over 1,200 km of driving. But plenty of other spectators smiled and waved, and some even did a double-take at seeing an electric vehicle amid the sea of modern Ferraris and world-class vintage racers taking on this modern regulation rally.

I flew to Italy to join the Mille Miglia “Green,” which , for the past five years, has sought to raise awareness of sustainability and electric cars amid this famous (some might say infamous) race . And despite mixed reactions from the Italian crowds, our Polestar 3 performed quite well as it traced a historical route from Brescia to Rome and back.

The route snaked a trail through the Italian countryside based on the original speed race’s first 12 outings, but instead of going for overall pace, we spent five days competing against six other EVs for points based on time, distance, and average speed. Our team included a Polestar 2 and 4, and we faced a Mercedes-Benz G 580 with EQ Technology, an Abarth 600e, a Lotus Eletre, and a BYD Denza Z9GT saloon.

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Next week, Volvo shows off its new EX60 SUV to the world. It's the brand's next electric vehicle, one built on an all-new, EV-only platform that makes use of the latest in vehicle design trends, like a cell-to-body battery pack , large weight-saving castings, and an advanced electronic architecture run by a handful of computers capable of more than 250 trillion operations per second. This new software-defined platform even has a name: HuginCore, after one of the two ravens that collected information for the Norse god Odin.

It's not Volvo's first reference to mythology. "We have Thor's Hammer [Volvo's distinctive headlight design] and now we have HuginCore... one of the two trusted Ravens of Oden. He sent Hugin and Muninn out to fly across the realms and observe and gather information and knowledge, which they then share with Odin that enabled him to make the right decisions as the ruler of Asgard," said Alwin Bakkenes, head of global software engineering at Volvo Cars.

"And much like Hugin, the way we look at this technology platform, it collects information from all of the sensors, all of the actuators in the vehicle. It understands the world around the vehicle, and it enables us to actually anticipate around what lies ahead," Bakkenes told me.

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History buffs are no doubt familiar with the story of Shadrack Byfield , a rank-and-file British redcoat who fought during the War of 1812 and lost his left arm to a musket ball for his trouble. Byfield has been featured in numerous popular histories—including a children's book and a 2011 PBS documentary—as a shining example of a disabled soldier's stoic perseverance. But a newly rediscovered memoir that Byfield published in his later years is complicating that idealized picture of his post-military life, according to a new paper published in the Journal of British Studies.

Historian Eamonn O'Keeffe of Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, Canada, has been a Byfield fan ever since he read the 1985 children's novel, Redcoat , by Gregory Sass. His interest grew when he was working at Fort York, a War of 1812-era fort and museum, in Toronto. "There are dozens of memoirs written by British rank-and-file veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, but only a handful from the War of 1812, which was much smaller in scale," O'Keeffe told Ars. "Byfield's autobiography seemed to offer an authentic, ground-level view of the fighting in North America, helping us look beyond the generals and politicians and grapple with the implications of this conflict for ordinary people.

Born in 1789 in Wiltshire's Bradford-on-Avon suburbs, Byfield's parents intended him to follow in his weaver father's footsteps. He enlisted in the county militia when he turned 18 instead, joining the regular army the following year. When the War of 1812 broke out, Byfield was stationed at Fort George along the Niagara River, participating in the successful siege of Fort Detroit. At the Battle of Frenchtown in January 1813, he was shot in the neck, but he recovered sufficiently to join the campaigns against Fort Meigs and Fort Stephenson in Ohio.

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This week, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth touted their desire to “make Star Trek real”—while unconsciously reminding us of what the utopian science fiction franchise is fundamentally about.

Their Tuesday event was the latest in Hegseth’s ongoing “Arsenal of Freedom” tour, which was held at SpaceX headquarters in Starbase, Texas. (Itself a newly created town that takes its name from a term popularized by Star Trek .)

Neither Musk nor Hegseth seemed to recall that the “Arsenal of Freedom” phrase—at least in the context of Star Trek —is also the title of a 1988 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That episode depicts an AI-powered weapons system, and its automated salesman, which destroys an entire civilization and eventually threatens the crew of the USS Enterprise . (Some Trekkies made the connection, however.)

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