Neither outcome was great, but this one is the worse of the two.

Netflix has walked away from its planned takeover of Warner Bros Discovery, declining to raise its offer for the media conglomerate’s storied Hollywood studios and streaming business after it determined a sweetened rival offer from Paramount Skydance to be “superior”.

In a statement on Thursday evening, the Netflix co-chief executives Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said: “At the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive.”

In its revised offer, Paramount offered $31 (£23) a share for the company, up from $30; a $7bn regulatory termination fee if the merger is not approved; and a “ticking fee” amounting to about $650m in cash each quarter beginning after September.

Netflix was given four business days to beat Paramount’s revised offer but quickly decided against doing so.

“We believe we would have been strong stewards of Warner Bros’ iconic brands, and that our deal would have strengthened the entertainment industry and preserved and created more production jobs in the US,” Sarandos and Peters said.

“But this transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price.”

Zitron is apparently back for the plebs.

Hey all! I’m going to start hammering out free pieces again after a brief hiatus, mostly because I found myself trying to boil the ocean with each one, fearing that if I regularly emailed you you’d unsubscribe. I eventually realized how silly that was, so I’m back, and will be back more regularly. I’ll treat it like a column, which will be both easier to write and a lot more fun.

This quote is from the February 2016 conversation where my ex-wife and I agreed to divorce. It didn't seem at all plausible ... if we'd tried to make it work for seven years (of which perhaps three were good) and failed, how the hell was that going to happen?

A decade later, we appear determined to find out. Neither of us has a car, which means Lyfts are the order of the day when I head up there (she has a kitchen and indoor plumbing, so she doesn't come down to my van).

And this is keeping things to a pretty steady monthly cadence (three data points is a trend, and she wants me there next week) of a few nights, which I think is the sweet spot.

I've taken myself off the market. She's pulling me in far more than pushing me away (though she still does do both). We're both in our mid-40's at this point and uninterested in starting our life stories from the top with a new partner.

Which means we could be settling for each other, just ground down by life and seeking familiarity. There's no way we work long term; her kids hate me, and as such, the windows where I can visit are dictated by being sure neither will knock on the door.

But at this point, we've been talking on the phone almost daily, usually for hours, since my dad died in November.

We are not the couple who hated each other in 2016. In 2026, we are something different. Almost curious ... prodding, seeing what's still there. And the answer is a lot; we've not kept things platonic.

But it isn't about the sex. As I've said before, it's about the touch.

While lifesaving vaccines face a relentless onslaught from the Trump administration—with fervent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leading the charge—scientific literature is building a wondrous story: A vaccine appears to prevent dementia, including Alzheimer’s, and may even slow biological aging.

For years, study after study has noted that older adults vaccinated against shingles seemed to have a lower risk of dementia. A study last month suggested the same vaccine appears to slow biological aging, including lowering markers of inflammation.

“Our study adds to a growing body of work suggesting that vaccines may play a role in healthy aging strategies beyond solely preventing acute illness,” study author Eileen Crimmins, of the University of Southern California, said.

Another study this month suggested the positive findings against dementia from the past may even be underestimates of the vaccination’s potential, with a newer vaccine against shingles providing even more protection.

We’ve been saying this for years now, and we’re going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in: mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached. Every single time. And every single time it happens, the politicians who mandated these systems and the companies that built them act shocked—shocked!—that collecting enormous databases of government IDs, facial scans, and biometric data from millions of people turns out to be a security nightmare.

Well, here we go again.

A couple weeks ago, Discord announced it would launch “teen-by-default” settings for its global audience, meaning all users would be shunted into a restricted experience unless they verified their age through biometric scanning. The internet, predictably, was not thrilled. But while many users were busy venting their frustration, a group of security researchers decided to do something more useful: they took a look under the hood at Persona, one of the companies Discord was using for verification (specifically for users in the UK).

What they found, according to The Rage, was exactly what we would predict:

Together with two other researchers, they set out to look into Persona, the San Francisco-based startup that’s used by Discord for biometric identity verification – and found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a US government authorized server.

In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting – and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies.

Let me say that again: 2,456 publicly accessible files sitting on a government-authorized server, exposed to the open internet.

Ballooning memory prices are forecast to kill off entry-level PCs, leading to a decline in global shipments this year - and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones.

Analyst biz Gartner is projecting a drop in PC shipments of more than 10 percent during 2026, and a decline of around 8 percent for smartphones, all due to the AI-driven memory shortage.

Some types of memory have doubled or quadrupled in price since last year, and Gartner believes DRAM and NAND flash used in PCs and phones is set for a further 130 percent rise by the end of 2026.

The upshot of this is that the budget PC will disappear, simply because vendors won't be able to build them at a price that will satisfy cost-conscious buyers, according to Gartner research director Ranjit Atwal.

"Because the price of memory is increasing so much, vendors lose the ability to provide entry-level PCs – those below about $500," he told The Register.

Imagine this: You're on Reddit, Hacker News, or some forum, posting with a silly username like GamerCat2025 or SecretCoderX. You think you are anonymous, and no one knows you and so you can freely express your thoughts.

Well, a brand-new research paper just blew that idea apart. It's called "Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs" which is a fancy way of saying "figuring out the real person behind a secret online name".

The researchers include people ETH Zurich and, Anthropic (parent company of Claude), and a research group called MATS and they proved that today's super-powerful AI chatbots can play detective and unmask people way better than ever before.

Scientists have long warned that a warming world is likely to hasten the spread of infectious diseases, making vaccination even more critical to safeguard public health.

And though most scientists hail vaccines as one of public health’s greatest achievements, they have provoked fear, distrust, and contentious resistance since Edward Jenner invented the first vaccine, to prevent smallpox, in the late 1700s.

Yet, until now, the United States never installed an outspoken vaccine critic like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a top health official with the power to upend federal childhood vaccine recommendations. Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy and other top officials in the Trump administration have waged an “unprecedented attack on the nation’s evidence-based childhood immunization schedule,” a lawsuit, filed by 15 states, charged on Tuesday. Their actions will make people sicker and strain state resources, the suit claims.

A coalition of 14 attorneys general and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, is suing Kennedy, who has long promoted debunked theories linking vaccines to autism, as well as HHS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and its acting director, Jay Bhattacharya.

The US space agency has released a “pre-solicitation” for what is expected to be a hotly contested contract to develop a spacecraft to orbit Mars and relay communications from the red planet back to Earth.

Ars covered the intrigue surrounding the spacecraft in late January, which was initiated by US Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, as part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” legislation in the summer of 2025. The bill provided $700 million for NASA to develop the orbiter and specified funding had to be awarded “not later than fiscal year 2026,” which ends September 30, 2026. This legislation was seemingly crafted by Cruz’s office to favor a single contractor, Rocket Lab. However, multiple sources have told Ars it was poorly written and therefore the competition is more open than intended.

The pre-solicitation released this week is not a request for proposals from industry—it states that a draft Request for Proposals is forthcoming. Rather, it seeks feedback from industry and interested stakeholders about an “objectives and requirements” document that outlines the goals of the Mars mission.

We wrote recently about the FBI’s pre-dawn raid on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home, in which agents seized two laptops, a phone, a portable hard drive, a recording device, and even a Garmin watch. Natanson covers the federal workforce and had cultivated nearly 1,200 confidential sources across more than 120 government agencies. She was not accused of any crime. She was not the target of any investigation. The FBI told her that much while they were busy carting away basically everything she uses to do her job.

The raid was connected to the prosecution of Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a government contractor charged with retaining classified information. The DOJ wanted to rummage through a journalist’s entire digital life to find evidence against someone else. And they got a warrant to do it by, among other things, simply never mentioning to the magistrate judge that there’s a federal law—the Privacy Protection Act of 1980—that exists specifically to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening.

Last week, at a hearing on the Washington Post’s motion to get the devices back, Magistrate Judge William Porter let the DOJ attorneys have it. And then on Tuesday, he issued his ruling, blocking the government from searching Natanson’s devices and rescinding the portion of the warrant that would have let them do so.

Workers grappling with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence have said they feel “devalued” by the technology and warned of a downward trajectory in the quality of work.

Recent analysis by the International Monetary Fund found AI would affect about 40% of jobs around the world. Its head, Kristalina Georgieva, has said: “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”

Workers who have trained AI models to replace some or all of their roles tell the Guardian about their experiences.

The Trump administration’s latest policy of deporting immigrants to “third countries” to which they have no ties is unlawful and must be set aside, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday in a case that already reached the nation’s highest court.

US district judge Brian E Murphy in Massachusetts agreed to suspend his decision for 15 days, giving the government time to appeal his latest ruling in the case. Murphy noted that the US supreme court ruled in the administration’s favor last year, pausing his previous decision and clearing the way for a flight carrying several migrants to complete its trip to war-torn South Sudan, where they had no ties.

Murphy said migrants challenging the Department of Homeland Security’s policy have the right to “meaningful notice” and an opportunity to object before they are removed to a third country. The policy “extinguishes valid challenges to third-country removal by effecting removal before those challenges can be raised”, the judge concluded.

“These are our laws, and it is with profound gratitude for the unbelievable luck of being born in the United States of America that this court affirms these and our nation’s bedrock principle: that no ‘person’ in this country may be ‘deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law’,” Murphy wrote.