The Steam Link was a little box ahead of its time . It streamed games from a PC to a TV, ran 1,500 0f them natively, offered a strange (if somewhat lovable) little controller, and essentially required a great network, Ethernet cables, and a good deal of fiddling.

Valve quietly discontinued the Steam Link gear in November 2018 , but it didn't give up. These days, a Steam Link app can be found on most platforms, and Valve's sustained effort to move Linux-based (i.e., non-Windows-controlled) gaming forward has paid real dividends . If you still want a dedicated device to stream Steam games, however? A Raspberry Pi 5 (with some help from Valve) can be a Substitute Steam Link.

As detailed in the Raspberry Pi blog , there were previously means of getting Steam Link working on Raspberry Pi devices, but the platform's move away from proprietary Broadcom libraries—and from X to Wayland display systems—required "a different approach." Sam Lantinga from Valve worked with the Raspberry Pi team on optimizing for the Raspberry Pi 5 hardware. As of Steam Link 1.3.13 for the little board, Raspberry Pi 5 units could support up to 1080p at 144 frames per second (FPS) on the H.264 protocol and 4k at 60 FPS or 1080p at 240 FPS, presuming your primary gaming computer and network can support that.

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is trying to rein in data brokers that sell Americans' personal and financial information with a new rule that would classify the brokers as consumer reporting agencies. But the proposal has a dim future in the Trump administration, and the CFPB itself could face new limits planned by Republican politicians.

Currently, "the data broker industry collects and sells detailed information about Americans' personal lives and financial circumstances to anyone willing to pay," the CFPB announcement today said. The agency said it wants to "limit the sale of personal identifiers like Social Security Numbers and phone numbers collected by certain companies and make sure that people's financial data such as income is only shared for legitimate purposes, like facilitating a mortgage approval, and not sold to scammers targeting those in financial distress."

The proposed rule would "treat data brokers just like credit bureaus and background check companies," requiring them to comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act regardless of how the information is used. "Companies that sell data about income or financial tier, credit history, credit score, or debt payments would be considered consumer reporting agencies," the CFPB said.

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China has immediately retaliated against the US following new export curbs that the Biden administration announced Monday, which restrict a wider range of Chinese businesses from accessing any foreign products that include even a single US-made chip.

On Tuesday, China's Ministry of Commerce punched back, announcing a ban that takes effect immediately on "exports of 'dual-use items' related to gallium, germanium, antimony, and superhard materials to the US," Reuters reported . Such "dual-use items" cover goods and technologies used for civil or military purposes, while the rare-earth metals are critical to tech manufacturing.

"In principle, the export of gallium, germanium, antimony, and superhard materials to the United States shall not be permitted," China's ministry said.

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There's a common popular science demonstration involving "soap boats," in which liquid soap poured onto the surface of water creates a propulsive flow driven by gradients in surface tension. But it doesn't last very long since the soapy surfactants rapidly saturate the water surface, eliminating that surface tension. Using ethanol to create similar "cocktail boats" can significantly extend the effect because the alcohol evaporates rather than saturating the water.

That simple classroom demonstration could also be used to propel tiny robotic devices across liquid surfaces to carry out various environmental or industrial tasks, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv. The authors also exploited the so-called " Cheerios effect " as a means of self-assembly to create clusters of tiny ethanol-powered robots.

As previously reported , those who love their Cheerios for breakfast are well acquainted with how those last few tasty little "O"s tend to clump together in the bowl: either drifting to the center or to the outer edges. The "Cheerios effect is found throughout nature, such as in grains of pollen (or, alternatively, mosquito eggs or beetles) floating on top of a pond; small coins floating in a bowl of water; or fire ants clumping together to form life-saving rafts during floods. A 2005 paper in the American Journal of Physics outlined the underlying physics, identifying the culprit as a combination of buoyancy, surface tension, and the so-called " meniscus effect."

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Software engineer Vishnu Mohandas decided he would quit Google in more ways than one when he learned that the tech giant had briefly helped the US military develop AI to study drone footage . In 2020 he left his job working on Google Assistant and also stopped backing up all of his images to Google Photos . He feared that his content could be used to train AI systems, even if they weren’t specifically ones tied to the Pentagon project. “I don't control any of the future outcomes that this will enable,” Mohandas thought. “So now, shouldn't I be more responsible?”

Mohandas, who taught himself programming and is based in Bengaluru, India, decided he wanted to develop an alternative service for storing and sharing photos that is open source and end-to-end encrypted . Something “more private, wholesome, and trustworthy,” he says. The paid service he designed, Ente, is profitable and says it has more than 100,000 users, many of whom are already part of the privacy-obsessed crowd. But Mohandas struggled to articulate to wider audiences why they should reconsider relying on Google Photos, despite all the conveniences it offers.

Then one weekend in May, an intern at Ente came up with an idea: Give people a sense of what some of Google’s AI models can learn from studying images. Last month, Ente launched https://Theyseeyourphotos.com , a website and marketing stunt designed to turn Google’s technology against itself. People can upload any photo to the website, which is then sent to a Google Cloud computer vision program that writes a startlingly thorough three-paragraph description of it. (Ente prompts the AI model to document small details in the uploaded images.)

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Oh, Enron, I thought—hoped and dreamed?—you were long, long gone, confined to the dustbin of history reserved for seriously fraudulent companies.

But apparently not.

More than two decades after Enron's bankruptcy in December 2001, the company is back. Well, at least an entity using the website Enron.com went public on Monday, announcing Enron's relaunch as "a company dedicated to solving the global energy crisis."

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Bird flu has landed on a California farm that shuns virus-killing pasteurization, leading to a second recall of raw milk and a suspension of operations at the company, Raw Farm in Fresno County.

According to a November 27 alert by the California health department, officials in Santa Clara County found evidence of bird flu virus in retail samples of a batch of Raw Farm's milk, which has been recalled. It is the second time that retail testing has turned up positive results for the company and spurred a recall. The first contaminated batch was reported on November 24 . The two recalled batches are those with lot codes 20241109 ("Best By" date of November 27, 2024) and 20241119 (Best By date of December 7, 2024).

In an email to Ars on Monday, Raw Farm CEO Mark McAfee said that none of the company's cows are visibly sick but that it appears that asymptomatic cows are shedding the avian influenza virus.

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Ralph Loya was pretty sure he was going to lose the corn. His farm had been scorched by El Paso’s hottest-ever June and second-hottest August; the West Texas county saw 53 days soar over 100° Fahrenheit in the summer of 2024. The region was also experiencing an ongoing drought, which meant that crops on Loya’s eight-plus acres of melons, okra, cucumbers, and other produce had to be watered more often than normal.

Loya had been irrigating his corn with somewhat salty, or brackish, water pumped from his well, as much as the salt-sensitive crop could tolerate. It wasn’t enough, and the municipal water was expensive; he was using it in moderation, and the corn ears were desiccating where they stood.

Ensuring the survival of agriculture under an increasingly erratic climate is approaching a crisis in the sere and sweltering Western and Southwestern United States, an area that supplies much of our beef and dairy, alfalfa, tree nuts, and produce. Contending with too little water to support their plants and animals, farmers have tilled under crops, pulled out trees, fallowed fields, and sold off herds. They’ve also used drip irrigation to inject smaller doses of water closer to a plant’s roots and installed sensors in soil that tell more precisely when and how much to water.

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A Delaware judge today rejected Elon Musk's bid to reinstate a Tesla pay package that was worth over $50 billion at the beginning of 2024 and has now crossed $100 billion based on Tesla's latest share price. The judge also ordered Tesla to pay $345 million in attorneys' fees to the plaintiff's counsel, who had sought $5.6 billion in fees.

Delaware Court of Chancery Judge Kathaleen McCormick, who voided the pay plan in January , said today that a June 2024 shareholder vote re-approving the 2018 pay plan is not a compelling reason to reverse the original ruling. Her ruling said that a "large and talented group of defense firms got creative with the ratification argument, but their unprecedented theories go against multiple strains of settled law."

Musk is thus prevented from accessing a pay package whose potential value has soared along with Tesla's stock price. "As of Monday, the pay package was worth $101.4 billion, according to Equilar, a compensation consulting firm," Reuters wrote .

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