The European Commission issued a €500 million fine to Apple and a €200 million fine to Meta yesterday, saying that both companies violated the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The companies are required to bring their platforms into compliance within 60 days or face "periodic penalty payments," the EC said.

These are the first two non-compliance decisions adopted by the commission under the DMA. The EC said it determined that Apple breached its anti-steering obligation and that "Meta breached the DMA obligation to give consumers the choice of a service that uses less of their personal data."

"Apple and Meta have fallen short of compliance with the DMA by implementing measures that reinforce the dependence of business users and consumers on their platforms," said European Commissioner for Competition Teresa Ribera.

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At the Meta monopoly trial, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom accused Mark Zuckerberg of draining Instagram resources to stifle growth out of sheer jealousy.

According to Systrom, Zuckerberg may have been directly involved in yanking resources after integrating Instagram and Facebook because "as the founder of Facebook, he felt a lot of emotion around which one was better—Instagram or Facebook," The Financial Times reported .

In 2025, Instagram is projected to account for more than half of Meta's ad revenue, according to eMarketer's forecast . Since 2019, Instagram has generated more ad revenue per user than Facebook, eMarketer noted, and today makes Meta twice as much per user as the closest rival that Meta claims it fears most, TikTok.

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Bethesda fans are understandably excited about the opportunity to revisit the world of Cyrodiil with yesterday's heavily telegraphed release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered . But that excitement may have been tinged with at least a little bit of trepidation for the team behind Skyblivion , a volunteer-run project that has spent years trying to "port and rebuild" 2007's Oblivion into the updated engine from 2016's remastered Skyrim: Special Edition .

Fortunately for the Skyblivion team, Bethesda has apparently decided there's room enough in this world for both official and unofficial remakes of Oblivion . The team took to social media Tuesday to thank Bethesda for "their continued support" and for "the generous gift of Oblivion Remastered game keys for our entire modding team."

"To clear up any confusion Bethesda made it clear that they have no intention of shutting down our project," the team added in a social media reply .

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In the nearly two weeks since Ars reported on the Trump administration's proposed budget cuts for NASA's science programs, scientists and Democratic lawmakers have both expressed deep concerns about the future of the space agency.

However, in a pattern consistent across a host of issues in which GOP lawmakers do not want to be seen to be publicly criticizing the Trump administration, the response to these sweeping cuts from Republican officials has been much more muted.

But this week, three prominent Republican space policy officials broke their silence. In an op-ed published Tuesday on Real Clear Science, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former House Chair Robert Walker, and the head of the landing team for NASA for the Trump-Vance transition team, Charles Miller, said they were "deeply disturbed" by the proposed cuts. All three men have played an important role in setting Republican space policy over the last decade.

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My earliest memory of 4chan was sitting up late at night, typing its URL into my browser, and scrolling through a thread of LOLcat memes, which were brand-new at the time.

Back then a photoshop of a cat saying "I can has cheezburger" or an image of an owl saying “ORLY?” was, without question, the funniest thing my 14-year-old brain had ever laid eyes on. So much so, I woke my dad up by laughing too hard and had to tell him that I was scrolling through pictures of cats at 2 in the morning. Later, I would become intimately familiar with the site’s much more nefarious tendencies.

It's strange to look back at 4chan, apparently wiped off the Internet entirely last week by hackers from a rival message board, and think about how many different websites it was over its more than two decades online. What began as a hub for Internet culture and an anonymous way station for the Internet's anarchic true believers devolved over the years into a fan club for mass shooters, the central node of Gamergate , and the beating heart of far-right fascism around the world—a virus that infected every facet of our lives, from the slang we use to the politicians we vote for. But the site itself had been frozen in amber since the George W. Bush administration.

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If you've read our cargo e-bike shopper's guide , you may be well on your way to owning a new ride. Now comes the fun part.

Part of the joy of diving into a new hobby is researching and acquiring the necessary (and less-than-necessary) stuff. And cycling (or, for the casual or transportation-first rider, “riding bikes”) is no different—there are hundreds of ways to stock up on talismanic, Internet-cool parts and accessories that you may or may not need.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing! And you can even get creative—PC case LEDs serve the same function as a very specific Japanese reflective triangle that hangs from your saddle . But let’s start with the strictly necessary.

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Tesla managed to hold onto profitability in the first quarter of 2025. Just. Earlier this month the automaker reported double-digit declines in both production and delivery numbers thanks to the impact of CEO Elon Musk's central role in the Trump administration, a global trade war, and an increasingly outdated and tiny product lineup. Yesterday, we saw the true cost of those factors when Tesla published its profit and loss statement for Q1 2025.

Total revenues fell by nine percent year-over-year to $19.3 billion in Q1. Selling cars accounts for 72 percent of Tesla's revenue, but these automotive revenues fell by 20 percent year-over-year. Strong growth (67 percent) in Tesla's storage battery and solar division helped the bottom line, as did a modest 15 percent increase in revenue from services, which includes its Supercharger stations, which are now opening to other car brands.

But Tesla's expenses grew slightly in Q1 2025, and more importantly its profitability shrank. Income from operations fell by two-thirds to $399 million, and its operating margin—once as high as 20 percent—has fallen to just 2.1 percent. Now the third successive fall in a row , the company will start to lose money on every car it sells should this trend continue.

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Last Friday, in an op-ed piece on the Trump administration's war on American universities , we called for academia to 1) band together and 2) resist coercive control over hiring and teaching, though we noted that the 3) "temperamental caution of university administrators" means that they might "have trouble finding a clear voice to speak with when they come under thundering public attacks from a government they are more used to thinking of as a funding source."

It only took billions of dollars in vindictive cuts to make it happen, but higher education has finally 1) banded together to 2) resist coercive control over its core functions. More than 230 leaders, mostly college and university presidents, have so far signed an American Association of Colleges and Universities statement that makes a thundering call gentle bleat for total resistance "constructive engagement" with the people currently trying to cripple, shutter, and/or dominate them. Clearly, 3) temperamental caution remains the watchword. Still, progress! (Even Columbia University, which has already capitulated to Trump administration pressure, signed on.)

The statement largely consists of painful pablum about how universities "provide human resources to meet the fast-changing demands of our dynamic workforce," etc, etc. As a public service, I will save you some time (and nausea) by excerpting the bits that matter:

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Climate tipping points pose grave risks to human health—and, unsurprisingly, approaching them while tipsy only makes the fallout more blistering, according to a case study in the New England Journal of Medicine .

In this week's issue, NEJM spotlights the effects of the climate crisis on clinical health with a series of case studies. One is the searing story of an inebriated gentleman who regrettably took a one-minute walk while barefoot during the unprecedented 2021 Northwest heat dome . The man walked across asphalt during the extreme weather, in which air temperatures reached as high as 42° C (108° F). That's about 21° C (38° F) above historical averages for the area.

Asphalt can absorb 95 percent of solar radiation and easily reach 40° F to 60° F above air temperatures on hot days. It's unclear how hot the asphalt was when the man walked across it, but it was clearly hot enough to melt some flesh.

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