Industrial Light and Magic has published a behind-the-scenes video on the production of Disney+’s The Mandalorian that gives an illuminating look at two of the biggest, high-tech trends in film and TV production: LED sets, and using game engines to create scenes. The video explains a major shift in virtual filmmaking that is unknown to…

The first time Lucy Kyselica’s face was stolen, it turned up in the window of a beauty salon in small-town America. Kyselica is a Dutch beauty YouTuber who mostly makes videos about historical hairdos, but she had also made a video showing her subscribers how to thread their own eyebrows. The salon took a screengrab…

Adults who use Google products and services tend to know, at least on some background level, that the cost for access to “free” tools is paid in data. Google also provides low- and no-cost hardware and software tools to students and educators in school districts nationwide, and one state now says that children are also…

A California man has been arrested on charges he used distributed denial-of-service attacks to take down the website of a Congressional candidate whose rival employed his wife. Arthur Jan Dam, 32, of Santa Monica, was arrested by FBI agents on Thursday. According to a criminal complaint filed in Los Angeles federal court, Dam DDoSed the…

A new White House report claims without convincing evidence that eliminating consumer-protection rules in the broadband industry has boosted real incomes by tens of billions of dollars per year. Including a supposed improvement to “consumer welfare,” the report claims an annual benefit of more than $100 billion from killing net neutrality and privacy rules. The…

Pixar’s latest feature-length film, Onward, doesn’t reach US theaters until March 6, and it’s rare for us at Ars Technica to review a film so far in advance of its launch. When we do, it’s usually for good reason. In Onward’s case, that’s because we haven’t seen a film so easy to recommend to Ars…

In a world where various mass breachers dictate the use of strong, randomized passwords more than ever, reliable and secure credentials management is paramount in 2020. One Irish drug dealer has evidently learned this lesson the hard way. This week, the Irish Times reported the sad tale of Clifton Collins, a 49-year-old cannabis grower from…

Health officials at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not want 14 people who had tested positive for the new coronavirus to be flown back to the US, among hundreds of other uninfected people—but the CDC experts were overruled by officials at the US State Department, according to a report by The…

Portable SSDs are a good way to increase the amount of storage you have to preserve digital data and take that data with you wherever you go. These powerful accessories let you pack a huge amount of storage in your daily bag, giving you a place where you can offload files from your computer or…

Japan’s space agency has finalized a plan to send a probe to the Martian moons of Phobos and Deimos, and it includes an ambitious lander to collect samples from Phobos to return to Earth. The agency, JAXA, submitted the plan to the country’s science ministry on Wednesday, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported. On Twitter, the…