Amazon workers are being reminded that they can find work elsewhere if they’re unhappy with Amazon’s return-to-office (RTO) mandate.

In September, Amazon told staff that they’ll have to RTO five days a week starting in 2025. Amazon employees are currently allowed to work remotely twice a week. A memo from CEO Andy Jassy announcing the policy change said that “it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture” when working at the office.

On Thursday, at what Reuters described as an “all-hands meeting” for Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS CEO Matt Garman reportedly told workers:

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Yesterday, it was reported that the US Department of Commerce is investigating the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) over suspicions that the chipmaker may have been subverting 5G export controls to make "artificial intelligence or smartphone chips for the Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies," sources with direct knowledge told The Information .

The Department of Commerce has yet to officially announce the probe and declined Ars' request for comment. But TSMC promptly issued a statement today, defending itself as "a law-abiding company" that's "committed to complying with laws and regulations, including export controls."

For the past four years, the US has considered Huawei a national security risk after Huawei allegedly provided financial services to Iran , violating another US export control . In that time, US-China tensions have intensified, with the US increasingly imposing tariffs to limit China's access to US tech, most recently increasing tariffs on semiconductors . As competitiveness over AI dominance has heightened, Congress also recently introduced a bill to stop China and other foreign adversaries from accessing American-made AI and AI-enabling technologies.

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Elon Musk's X updated its terms of service to steer user lawsuits to US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the same court where a judge who bought Tesla stock is overseeing an X lawsuit against the nonprofit Media Matters for America.

The new terms that apply to users of the X social network say that all disputes related to the terms "will be brought exclusively in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas or state courts located in Tarrant County, Texas, United States, and you consent to personal jurisdiction in those forums and waive any objection as to inconvenient forum."

X recently moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Texas, but the new headquarters are not in the Northern District or Tarrant County. X's headquarters are in Bastrop, the county seat of Bastrop County, which is served by US District Court for the Western District of Texas .

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On Thursday, OpenAI released an early Windows version of its first ChatGPT app for Windows, following a Mac version that launched in May . Currently, it's only available to subscribers of Plus, Team, Enterprise, and Edu versions of ChatGPT, and users can download it for free in the Microsoft Store for Windows.

OpenAI is positioning the release as a beta test. "This is an early version, and we plan to bring the full experience to all users later this year," OpenAI writes on the Microsoft Store entry for the app. (Interestingly, ChatGPT shows up as being rated "T for Teen" by the ESRB in the Windows store, despite not being a video game.)

A screenshot of the new Windows ChatGPT app captured on October 18, 2024.

Credit: Benj Edwards

Upon opening the app, OpenAI requires users to log into a paying ChatGPT account, and from there, the app is basically identical to the web browser version of ChatGPT. You can currently use it to access several models: GPT-4o, GPT-4o with Canvas , 01-preview, 01-mini, GPT-4o mini, and GPT-4. Also, it can generate images using DALL-E 3 or analyze uploaded files and images.

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Today, federal safety investigators opened a new investigation aimed at Tesla's electric vehicles. This is now the 14th investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and one of several currently open . This time, it's the automaker's highly controversial "full self-driving" feature that's in the crosshairs—NHTSA says it now has four reports of Teslas using FSD and then crashing after the camera-only system encountered fog, sun glare, or airborne dust.

Of the four crashes that sparked this investigation , one caused the death of a pedestrian when a Model Y crashed into them in Rimrock, Arizona, in November 2023.

NHTSA has a standing general order that requires it to be told if a car crashes while operating under partial or full automation. Fully automated or autonomous means cars might be termed "actually self-driving," such as the Waymos and Zooxes that clutter up the streets of San Francisco. Festooned with dozens of exterior sensors, these four-wheel testbeds drive around—mostly empty of passengers—gathering data to train themselves with later, with no human supervision. (This is also known as SAE level 4 automation.)

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At this point, we're used to AI-powered image tools that instantly pull off previously high-effort edits, like filling in the missing bits of a scene or erasing unwanted parts of a photo without affecting the background. But a new Adobe Illustrator tool demonstrated at this week's Adobe MAX conference takes 2D image editing things in a literal different direction, letting artists instantly transform 2D vector images into 3D models that can be rotated around the axis of the screen itself.

"Project Turntable" is currently just a tightly controlled demo, part of a set of "Sneaks" that aren't ready to roll out to the public just yet. But even the short early demo shown on stage has some intriguing time-saving implications for working 2D artists.

You spin me right round

In a quick five-minute stage presentation at the MAX conference, Adobe researcher Zhiqin Chen starts with a 2D, vectorized Illustrator scene of a warrior fighting a dragon. The warrior is staring directly out of the screen, though, and turning him to face the dragon on his left would usually require "redraw[ing] the entire shape, which is going to take a lot of time," as Chen points out.

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If you're using a large battery for a specialized purpose—say grid-scale storage or an electric vehicle—then it's possible to tweak the battery chemistry, provide a little bit of excess capacity, and carefully manage its charging and discharging so that it enjoys a long life span. But for consumer electronics, the batteries are smaller, the need for light weight dictates the chemistry, and the demand for quick charging can be higher. So most batteries in our gadgets start to see serious degradation after just a couple of years of use.

A big contributor to that is an internal fragmentation of the electrode materials. This leaves some of the electrode material disconnected from the battery's charge handling system, essentially stranding the material inside the battery and trapping some of the lithium uselessly. Now, researchers have found that, for at least one battery chemistry, it's possible to partially reverse some of this decay, boosting the remaining capacity of the battery by up to 30 percent.

The only problem is that not many batteries use the specific chemistry tested here. But it does show how understanding what's going on inside batteries can provide us with ways to extend their lifespan.

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Welcome to Edition 7.16 of the Rocket Report! Even several days later, it remains difficult to process the significance of what SpaceX achieved in South Texas last Sunday. The moment of seeing a rocket fall out of the sky and be captured by two arms felt historic to me, as historic as the company's first drone ship landing in April 2016. What a time to be alive.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Surprise! Rocket Lab adds a last-minute mission . After signing a launch contract less than two months ago, Rocket Lab says it will launch a customer as early as Saturday from New Zealand on board its Electron launch vehicle. Rocket Lab added that the customer for the expedited mission, to be named "Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes," is confidential. This is an impressive turnaround in launch times and will allow Rocket Lab to burnish its credentials for the US Space Force, which has prioritized "responsive" launch in recent years.

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A few months back, I put together a big fat guide on how to configure DNS and DHCP on your LAN the old-school way , with bind and dhcpd working together to seamlessly hand out addresses to hosts on your network and also register those hosts in your LAN's forward and reverse DNS lookup zones. The article did really well—thanks for reading it!—but one thing commenters pointed out was that my preferred dhcpd implementation, the venerable isc-dhcp-server, reached end-of-life in 2022 . To replace it, ISC has for many years been working on the development of a new DHCP server named Kea .

Kea (which for this piece will refer mainly to the isc-kea-dhcp4 and isc-kea-dhcp-ddns applications) doesn't alter the end-user experience of receiving DHCP addresses—your devices won't much care if you're using isc-dhcp-server or isc-kea-dhcp4. Instead, what Kea brings to the table is a new codebase that jettisons the older dhcpd's multi-decade pile of often crufty code for a new pile of much less crufty code that will (hopefully) be easier to maintain and extend.

Many Ars readers are aware of the classic Joel on Software blog post about how rewriting your application from scratch is almost never a good idea , but something like isc-dhcp-server—whose redesign is being handled planfully by the Internet Systems Consortium—is the exception to the rule.

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