Month: March 2024

Enlarge / In this photo illustration, melatonin gummies are displayed on April 26, 2023, in Miami, Florida. (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle)

Federal regulators have long decried drug-containing products that appeal to kids—like nicotine-containing e-cigarette products with fruity and dessert-themed flavors or edible cannabis products sold to look exactly like name-brand candies.

But a less-expected candy-like product is sending thousands of kids to emergency departments in the US in recent years: melatonin, particularly in gummy form. According to a new report from researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, use of the over-the-counter sleep-aid supplement has skyrocketed in recent years—and so have calls to poison control centers and visits to emergency departments.

Melatonin, a neurohormone that regulates the sleep-wake cycle, has become very popular for self-managing conditions like sleep disorders and jet lag—even in children. Use of melatonin in adults rose from 0.4 percent in 1999–2000 to 2.1 percent in 2017–2018. But the more people have these tempting, often candy-like supplements in their homes, the more risk that children will get ahold of them unsupervised. Indeed, the rise in use led to a 530 percent increase in poison control center calls and a 420 percent increase in emergency department visits for accidental melatonin ingestion in infants and kids between 2009 and 2020.

Enlarge / Chevrolet suspended sales of the Blazer EV for three months as a result of software and charging problems. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

The Chevrolet Blazer EV is back on sale today, more than three months after the automaker took its newest electric vehicle off the market due to a litany of software problems. It has also cut Blazer EV prices, and the company says that the EV now qualifies for the full $7,500 IRS clean vehicle tax credit.

The Blazer EV was the first Chevrolet-badged EV using General Motors' new Ultium battery platform. Introduced at CES in 2022, Chevrolet actually started delivering the first Blazer EVs last August. But not very many of them—by the end of the year, only 463 Blazer EVs had found homes.

Ars drove the Blazer EV in December and came away unconvinced. On the road, it suffered from lots of NVH, and we ran into software bugs with the Ultifi infotainment system. We weren't the only ones to experience problems—charging bugs left another journalist stranded on a road trip with a Blazer EV that refused to charge.

Enlarge / The bigger Pixel 8 Pro gets the latest AI features. The smaller model does not. (credit: Google)

If you believe Google's marketing hype, AI in a phone is really, really important, the best AI is Google's, and the best place to get that AI is Google's flagship smartphone, the Pixel 8. We're five months removed from the launch of the Pixel 8, and that doesn't seem like a justifiable position anymore: Google says its latest AI models can't run on the Pixel 8.

Google dropped that news in a Mobile World Congress wrap-up video that was spotted by Mishaal Rahman. At the end of the show in a Q&A session, Googler Terence Zhang, a member of the Gemini-on-Android team, said "[Gemini] Nano will not be coming to the Pixel 8 because of some hardware limitations. It's currently on the Pixel 8 Pro and very recently available on the Samsung S24 family. It'll be coming to more high-end devices in the near future."

That is a wild statement. Gemini is Google's latest AI model, and it made a big deal of the launch last month. Gemini comes in a few different sizes, and the smallest "Nano" size is specifically designed to run on smartphones as a much-hyped "on-device AI." The Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro are Google's flagship smartphones. Google designed the phone and the chip and the AI model and somehow can't make these things play nice together?

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Epic Games celebrating their impending return to iOS in Europe. (credit: Epic Games)

Apple has agreed to reinstate Epic Game's Swedish iOS developer account just days after Epic publicized Apple's decision to rescind that account. The move once again paves the way for Epic's plans to release a sideloadable version of the Epic Games Store and Fortnite on iOS devices in Europe.

"Following conversations with Epic, they have committed to follow the rules, including our DMA policies," Apple said in a statement provided to Ars Technica. "As a result, Epic Sweden AB has been permitted to re-sign the developer agreement and accepted into the Apple Developer Program."

Apple's new statement is in stark contrast to its position earlier this week when it cited "Epic’s egregious breach of its contractual obligations to Apple" as a reason why it couldn't trust Epic's commitments to stand by any new developer agreement. In correspondence with Epic shared by the Fortnite maker Wednesday, Apple executive Phil Schiller put an even finer point on it:

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Microsoft said that Kremlin-backed hackers stole its proprietary source code during a January breach of its corporate network and is now using it and other secrets in follow-on attacks against customers.

The intrusion, which the software company disclosed in January, was carried out by Midnight Blizzard, the name used to track a hacking group widely attributed to the Federal Security Service, a Russian intelligence agency. Microsoft said at the time that Midnight Blizzard gained access to senior executives’ email accounts for months after first exploiting a weak password in a test device connected to the company’s network. Microsoft went on to say it had no indication any of its source code or production systems had been compromised.

Unprecedented global threat

In an update published Friday, Microsoft said it has since uncovered evidence that Midnight Blizzard did, in fact, access “some of the company’s source code repositories and internal systems.” The hacking group—which is tracked under multiple other names, including APT29, Cozy Bear, CozyDuke, The Dukes, Dark Halo, and Nobelium—has been using the proprietary information in follow-on attacks, mainly against Microsoft customers.

Enlarge / A plucky, likable creature under the looming threat of consumption by an interconnected menacing force of nature in one of Adult Swim Games' titles. (credit: Adult Swim Games)

Warner Bros. Discovery seems set to remove at least 16 games from its Adult Swim Games subsidiary from games markets and has told the affected developers that it will not transfer the games back to them nor offer other means of selling them in the future.

Ars reported Wednesday on the plight of Small Radios Big Televisions, a Steam and PlayStation game made by a solo developer who received a notice from Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) that it was "retiring" his game within 60 days.

In a comment on that Ars post, Matt Kain, developer of Adult Swim Games' Fist Puncher, noted that they had received the same "retired" notice from WBD. "When we requested that Warner Bros simply transfer the game over to our studio's Steam publisher account so that the game could stay active, they said no. The transfer process literally takes a minute to initiate (look up "Transferring Applications" in the Steamworks documentation), but their rep claimed they have simply made the universal decision not to transfer the games to the original creators," Kain wrote.

Enlarge / Tesla Superchargers. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Tesla drivers who say the carmaker "grossly" exaggerated the ranges of its electric vehicles have lost their attempt to sue Tesla as a class. They will have to pursue claims individually in arbitration, a federal judge ruled yesterday.

Two related lawsuits were filed after a Reuters investigation last year found that Tesla consistently exaggerated the driving range of its electric vehicles, leading car owners to think something was broken when the actual driving range was much lower than advertised. Tesla reportedly created a "Diversion Team" to handle these complaints and routinely canceled service appointments because there was no way to improve the actual distance Tesla cars could drive between charges.

Several Tesla drivers sued in US District Court for the Northern District of California, seeking class-action status to represent buyers of Tesla cars.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson/Jonathan Gitlin/Getty Images)

Apple spent roughly $1 billion a year on its car project before canceling it last month, according to a report in Bloomberg. The project, which apparently made as little sense to many inside Apple as it did to outside observers, began in 2014 as the tech giant looked for a new revenue stream to supplement its hardware and software businesses. But grand plans for a fully autonomous vehicle were never able to overcome the various technical challenges, and prototypes only ever ran on a closed-course test track.

During his tenure as CEO, the late Steve Jobs contemplated Apple getting into the automotive world, an idea that did not survive the global financial crisis of 2008. But by 2013, Apple executives thought this could be "one more example of Apple entering a market very late and vanquishing it."

At first, the company considered simply acquiring Tesla—at the time the startup automaker was worth just under $28 billion, a fraction of the annual profit that Apple was raking in even then. It is suggested that Musk standing down from Tesla was a sticking point, and talks ended. Later, in 2017 Musk apparently tried to interest Apple in buying Tesla, which at the time was mired in Model 3 "production hell," but current Apple CEO Tim Cook refused the meeting.