When my colleague Kyle Orland submitted Tetrisweeper for a list of Ars' favorite 2024 games not from 2024 , I told him, essentially: "Good for you, not for me." I'm a pedestrian Tetris player, at best, so the idea of managing a whole different game mechanic, while trying to clear lines and prevent stack-ups, sounded like taking a standardized test while baking a three-layer cake.

And yet, here I am, sneaking rounds of Drop Duchy ( Steam , Epic , for Windows/Linux via Proton) into lunch breaks, weekend mornings, and other bits of downtime. Drop Duchy is similarly not just a Tetris -esque block-dropper. It also has you:

• Aligning terrain types for resources
• Placing both your troops and the enemy's
• Choosing which cards to upgrade, sell, and bring into battle
• Picking between terrain types to leave behind
• Upgrading a tech tree with achievements
• Picking the sequence of battles for maximum effectiveness

Drop Duchy is a quirky game, one that hasn't entirely fused together its various influences without some seams showing. But I keep returning to it, even as it beats me to a pulp on Normal mode, based on decisions I made five rounds ago. It feels like a medium-deep board game, played at triple speed, with someone across the table timing you on how fast you arrange your tiles.

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Welcome to Edition 7.44 of the Rocket Report! We had some interesting news on Thursday afternoon from Down Under. As Gilmour Space was preparing for the second launch attempt of its Eris vehicle, as part of the pre-launch preparations, something triggered the payload fairing to deploy. We would love to see some video of that. Please.

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.

Rotating detonation rocket engine takes flight . On Wednesday, US-based propulsion company Venus Aerospace completed a short flight test of its rotating detonation rocket engine at Spaceport America in New Mexico, Ars reports . It is believed to be the first US-based flight test of an idea that has been discussed academically for decades. The concept has previously been tested in a handful of other countries, but never with a high-thrust engine.

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The payload fairing at the top of Gilmour Space's first Eris rocket was supposed to deploy a few minutes after lifting off from northeastern Australia. Instead, the nose cone fell off the rocket hours before it was supposed to leave the launch pad Thursday.

Gilmour, the Australian startup that developed the Eris rocket, announced the setback in a post to the company's social media accounts Thursday.

"During final launch preparations last night, an electrical fault triggered the system that opens the rocket’s nose cone (the payload fairing)," Gilmour posted on LinkedIn . "This happened before any fuel was loaded into the vehicle. Most importantly, no one was injured, and early checks show no damage to the rocket or the launch pad."

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The FBI is warning people to be vigilant of an ongoing malicious messaging campaign that uses AI-generated voice audio to impersonate government officials in an attempt to trick recipients into clicking on links that can infect their computers.

“Since April 2025, malicious actors have impersonated senior US officials to target individuals, many of whom are current or former senior US federal or state government officials and their contacts,” Thursday’s advisory from the bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center said. “If you receive a message claiming to be from a senior US official, do not assume it is authentic.”

Think you can’t be fooled? Think again.

The campaign's creators are sending AI-generated voice messages—better known as deepfakes—along with text messages “in an effort to establish rapport before gaining access to personal accounts,” FBI officials said. Deepfakes use AI to mimic the voice and speaking characteristics of a specific individual. The differences between the authentic and simulated speakers are often indistinguishable without trained analysis. Deepfake videos work similarly.

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Masked men jumped out of a white-panel van in Paris this week, attempting to snatch a 34-year-old woman off the street . The woman's husband fought back and suffered a fractured skull, according to France24 . The woman continued resisting long enough for a bike shop owner named Nabil to rush out swinging a fire extinguisher, which he hurled after the departing van as the attackers finally fled. The entire altercation was captured on video.

The woman was identified as the daughter of a "crypto boss," and her attempted kidnapping is part of a disquieting surge in European crypto-related abductions —two of which have already involved fingers being chopped off. The last major abduction happened in Paris only two weeks ago, and it ended with French police storming a house in the Paris suburbs and rescuing a crypto mogul's now-four-fingered father.

The attacks have spooked the industry, which has called, somewhat ironically, for enhanced protections from the government. Reuters notes that the issue has been escalated all the way to the top of the French government, where Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau announced plans this week to "meet with French crypto entrepreneurs to make them aware of the risks and to take measures to protect them."

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Microsoft has continued to design, manufacture, and sell new Surface hardware since longtime team leader Panos Panay left the company for Amazon in late 2023 , including both Intel- and Qualcomm-powered Surface Pro tablets and Surface Laptops. New smaller versions of both of these mainstays were introduced just a couple of weeks ago .

But the weirder, more unique parts of the Surface lineup have been mostly neglected since Panay's departure. Late last year, Microsoft discontinued the Surface Studio all-in-one desktop , which was never updated consistently and started at a whopping $4,300. But it provided one of the few alternatives to the basic "monitor with a computer inside it" all-in-one design template. Now, The Verge reports that Microsoft stopped manufacturing the Surface Laptop Studio 2 earlier this month and that the PC will disappear after current retail stock is sold.

Microsoft reportedly plans to officially announce the end-of-life status of the Laptop Studio 2 in June. The company will support the Laptop Studio with driver and firmware updates as necessary through at least October of 2029, in accordance with its six-year support lifecycle for Surface hardware.

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Tesla has raised the ire of some of its customers, who are accusing the carmaker of misleading them. Until recently, it would not allow customers who leased its EVs to purchase them at the end of the lease. Instead, the leases stated that it "plan[s] to use those vehicles in the Tesla ride-hailing network."

Tesla instituted that policy for Model 3 leases starting in 2019 and later expanded it to the Model Y until changing the policy last November . But Tesla is not currently sitting on a fleet of several hundred thousand ex-lease autonomous Models 3 and Y, and as of today there exists no actual Tesla ride-hailing network.

Instead, it has been spiffing up the ex-lease cars with software updates and then selling them to new customers, according to Reuters . And that has made some former leasers a little unhappy that their old EVs weren't pressed into service making money for Tesla on an ongoing basis but rather just as a one-time transaction.

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On Thursday, Telegram announced it had removed two huge black markets estimated to have generated more than $35 billion since 2021 by serving cybercriminals and scammers.

Blockchain research firm Elliptic told Reuters that the Chinese-language markets Xinbi Guarantee and Huione Guarantee together were far more lucrative than Silk Road, an illegal drug marketplace that the FBI notoriously seized in 2013, which was valued at about $3.4 billion.

Both markets were forced offline on Tuesday, Elliptic reported , and already, Huione Guarantee has confirmed that its market will cease to operate entirely due to the Telegram removal.

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With the abrupt withdrawal of the US, the World Health Organization is grappling with a brutal funding shortfall, leaving the United Nations health agency to slash top leadership and run global programs on a budget similar to that of a local hospital system.

In remarks at a budget committee meeting Wednesday , WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus laid out the daunting budget numbers and announced a slimmed structure, cutting senior management from 14 to seven and the number of departments from 76 to 34.

"The loss of US funding, combined with reductions in official development assistance by some other countries, mean we are facing a salary gap for the next biennium of more than US$ 500 million," Tedros said.

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