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Amazon ends free ad-supported streaming service after Prime Video with ads debuts
Selling subscriptions to Prime Video with ads is more lucrative for Amazon.
Amazon is shutting down Freevee, its free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) service, as it heightens focus on selling ads on its Prime Video subscription service.
Amazon, which has owned IMDb since 1998, launched Freevee as IMDb Freedive in 2019. The service let people watch movies and shows, including Freevee originals, on demand without a subscription fee. Amazon’s streaming offering was also previously known as IMDb TV and rebranded to Amazon Freevee in 2022.
According to a report from Deadline this week, Freevee is being “phased out over the coming weeks,” but a firm closing date hasn’t been shared publicly.
Trump says Elon Musk will lead “DOGE,” a new Department of Government Efficiency
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to target “massive waste and fraud.”
President-elect Donald Trump today announced that a new Department of Government Efficiency—or “DOGE”—will be led by Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Musk and Ramaswamy, who founded pharma company Roivant Sciences, “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” according to the Trump statement on Truth Social.
DOGE apparently will not be an official federal agency, as Trump said it will provide advice “from outside” of government. But Musk, who has frequently criticized government subsidies despite seeking public money and obtaining various subsidies for his own companies, will apparently have significant influence over spending in the Trump administration. Musk has also had numerous legal disputes with regulators at agencies that regulate his companies.
“Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time,” Trump said. “To drive this kind of drastic change, the Department of Government Efficiency will provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before.”
What did the snowball Earth look like?
Entire continents, even in the tropics, seems to have been under sheets of ice.
By now, it has been firmly established that the Earth went through a series of global glaciations around 600 million to 700 million years ago, shortly before complex animal life exploded in the Cambrian. Climate models have confirmed that, once enough of a dark ocean is covered by reflective ice, it sets off a cooling feedback that turns the entire planet into an icehouse. And we’ve found glacial material that was deposited off the coasts in the tropics.
We have an extremely incomplete picture of what these snowball periods looked like, and Antarctic terrain provides different models for what an icehouse continent might look like. But now, researchers have found deposits that they argue were formed beneath a massive ice sheet that was being melted from below by volcanic activity. And, although the deposits are currently in Colorado’s Front Range, at the time they resided much closer to the equator.
In the icehouse
Glacial deposits can be difficult to identify in deep time. Massive sheets of ice will scour the terrain down to bare rock, leaving behind loosely consolidated bits of rubble that can easily be swept away after the ice is gone. We can spot when that rubble shows up in ocean deposits to confirm there were glaciers along the coast, but rubble can be difficult to find on land.
How Valve made Half-Life 2 and set a new standard for future games
From physics to greyboxing, Half-Life 2 broke a lot of new ground.
It’s Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day up through the 16th, we’ll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.
There has been some debate about which product was the first modern “triple-A” video game, but ask most people and one answer is sure to at least be a contender: Valve’s Half-Life 2.
For Western PC games, Half-Life 2 set a standard that held strong in developers’ ambitions and in players’ expectations for well over a decade. Despite that, there’s only so much new ground it truly broke in terms of how games are made and designed—it’s just that most games didn’t have the same commitment to scope, scale, and polish all at the same time.
Firefly Aerospace rakes in more cash as competitors struggle for footing
The Series D fundraising round was “oversubscribed” and netted Firefly $175 million.
Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based company resurrected from bankruptcy, is riding high these days. In a few months, Firefly will attempt to become the second company to safely place a commercial lander on the Moon. Firefly’s Alpha rocket has reached orbit four times, and engineers are developing a larger medium-class rocket in partnership with Northrop Grumman, one of the largest US aerospace and defense contractors.
There’s also an orbital transfer vehicle, named Elytra, in Firefly’s diversified portfolio. This diversification is proving attractive to investors. Firefly announced Tuesday that it completed a $175 million Series D fundraising round, resulting in a valuation of more than $2 billion. This follows a banner year of fundraising in 2023, when Firefly reported investors funneled approximately $300 million into the company at a valuation of $1.5 billion.
“Firefly is extremely grateful for our existing and new investors whose support demonstrates a huge vote of confidence in our capabilities and future,” said Jason Kim, who took over as the company’s CEO in October. He replaced Bill Weber, who resigned as chief executive after reports of an alleged inappropriate relationship with a female employee.
Tesla is recalling 2,431 Cybertrucks, and this time there’s no software fix
Owners of the affected trucks will require replacement hardware.
Tesla has issued yet another recall for the angular, unpainted Cybertruck. This is the sixth recall affecting the model-year 2024 Cybertruck to be issued since January, and it affects 2,431 vehicles in total. And this time, there’s no fix being delivered by a software update over the air—owners will need to have their pickup trucks physically repaired.
The problem is a faulty drive unit inverter, which stranded a Cybertruck at the end of July. Tesla says it started investigating the problem a week later and by late October arrived at the conclusion that it had made a bad batch of inverters that it used in production vehicles from November 6, 2023, until July 30, 2024. After a total of five failures and warranty claims that the company says “may be related to the condition,” Tesla issued a recall.
Tesla is often able to fix defects in its products by pushing out new software, something that leads many fans of the brand to get defensive over the topic. Although there is no requirement for a safety recall to involve some kind of hardware fix—20 percent of all car recalls are now software fixes—in this case, the solution to the failing inverters very much requires a technician to work on the affected trucks.
Discord admin gets 15 years for “one of the most significant leaks” in US history
Former airman’s arrest raised questions about who gets access to confidential docs.
Former US Air National Guard Jack Teixeira was sentenced to 15 years in prison for leaking confidential military documents on Discord.
Teixeira was arrested last year for sharing hundreds of pages of information online, some of which detailed national security secrets tied to US foreign adversaries and allies, including Russia, China, Ukraine, and South Korea. He secured the documents through his position at a Massachusetts military base, hoping to impress his young military-obsessed friends in a Discord group called “Thug Shaker Central.”
Back in March, Teixeira pled guilty to six counts of “willful retention and transmission of national defense information.” But in taking a plea deal, he got the government’s bigger spy charges tossed, avoiding a much longer possible maximum sentence of 60 years.
Teen in critical condition with Canada’s first human case of H5 bird flu
The teen had no clear exposures to animals. No contacts have tested positive.
A British Columbia teen who contracted Canada’s first known human case of H5 bird flu has deteriorated swiftly in recent days and is now in critical condition, health officials reported Tuesday.
The teen’s case was announced Saturday by provincial health officials, who noted that the teen had no obvious exposure to animals that could explain an infection with the highly pathogenic avian influenza. The teen tested positive for H5 bird flu at BC’s public health laboratory, and the result is currently being confirmed by the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.
The teen’s case reportedly began with conjunctivitis, echoing the H5N1 human case reports in the US. The case then progressed to fever and cough, and the teen was admitted to BC’s Children’s hospital late Friday. The teen’s condition varied throughout the weekend but had taken a turn for the worse by Tuesday, according to BC provincial health officer Bonnie Henry.
New single-motor Polestar 3 SUV starts at $67,500, orders open now
The Swedish automaker has added an entry-level version of the Polestar 3.
Polestar’s range expands a little more today. The Swedish spinoff announced that it is opening its order books for a cheaper, longer-range version of the Polestar 3 electric SUV that rather impressed us when we drove it earlier this year. The Polestar 3 Long Range Single Motor will cost $67,500—well under the price cap for the IRS clean vehicle tax credit, for which it qualifies, as it is built in South Carolina.
Dropping the front motor/generator unit means that the Polestar 3 LRSM is a good deal less powerful than the Long Range Dual Motor version we’ve driven, but 296 hp (220 kW) and 361 lb-ft (489 Nm) should ensure that while it isn’t as fast, it shouldn’t be any kind of slouch.
And the boost in range should more than make up for any increase in 0-60 times. The Polestar 3 LRSM can go 350 miles (563 km) on a single charge of the 111 kWh battery, compared to 315 miles (507 km) for the Polestar 3 LRDM.
Seeking favor with Musk and Trump, advertisers plot return to X
Lack of moderation, spike in racist content had led to an exodus by brands.
Elon Musk’s support for Donald Trump is set to boost X’s flagging business, with some marketers poised for a return to the social media platform in order to seek favor with the incoming administration.
Media executives told the Financial Times that some brands were preparing to advertise on X once again, as its billionaire owner was likely to gain an influential role within a second Trump White House.
The platform’s revenues have fallen dramatically since Musk’s $44 billion acquisition two years ago, with some investor estimates suggesting its current valuation is less than $10 billion.