Google on Friday unveiled its plan for its Chrome browser to secure HTTPS certificates against quantum computer attacks without breaking the Internet.

The objective is a tall order. The quantum-resistant cryptographic data needed to transparently publish TLS certificates is roughly 40 times bigger than the classical cryptographic material used today. Today’s X.509 certificates are about 64 bytes in size, and comprise six elliptic curve signatures and two EC public keys. This material can be cracked through the quantum-enabled Shor’s algorithm . Certificates containing the equivalent quantum-resistant cryptographic material are roughly 2.5 kilobytes. All this data must be transmitted when a browser connects to a site.

The bigger they come, the slower they move

“The bigger you make the certificate, the slower the handshake and the more people you leave behind,” said Bas Westerbaan, principal research engineer at Cloudflare, which is partnering with Google on the transition. “Our problem is we don’t want to leave people behind in this transition.” Speaking to Ars, he said that people will likely disable the new encryption if it slows their browsing. He added that the massive size increase can also degrade “middle boxes,” which sit between browsers and the final site.

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DENVER—The US Air Force's new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile is on track for its first test flight next year, military officials reaffirmed this week.

But no one is ready to say when hundreds of new missile silos, dug from the windswept Great Plains, will be finished, how much they cost, or, for that matter, how many nuclear warheads each Sentinel missile could actually carry.

The LGM-35A Sentinel will replace the Air Force's Minuteman III fleet, in service since 1970, with the first of the new missiles due to become operational in the early 2030s. But it will take longer than that to build and activate the full complement of Sentinel missiles and the 450 hardened underground silos to house them.

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Netflix has dropped out of the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), making Paramount Skydance the expected owner of WBD. A Paramount-WBD merger remains subject to regulatory approval, but it’s likely that we will see a Paramount-Skydance-Warner-Bros.-Discovery media giant.

Such a conglomerate would unite two legacy media companies that have struggled with profitability for years and have strongly invested in streaming and cable.

With Paramount inching closer to WBD ownership, let’s look at what the union implies for streaming and cable.

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Despite the headline, this isn't really a story about superconductivity—at least not the superconductivity that people care about, the stuff that doesn't require exotic refrigeration to work. Instead, it's a story about how superconductivity can be used as a test of some of the weirder consequences of quantum mechanics, one that involves non-existent particles of light that still act like they exist.

Researchers have found a way to get these virtual photons to influence the behavior of a superconductor, ultimately making it worse. That may in the end tell us something useful about superconductivity, but it'll probably take a little while.

Virtual reality

The story starts with quantum field theory, which is incredibly complex, but the simplified version is that even empty space is filled with fields that could govern the interactions of any quantum objects in or near that space. You can think of different particles as energetic excitements of these fields—so a photon is simply an energetic state of the quantum field.

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The US military mistakenly shot down a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) drone near the Mexican border in a strike that reportedly used a laser-based anti-drone system. The CBP uses drones to track people crossing the border.

"Congressional aides told Reuters the Pentagon used the high-energy laser system to shoot down a Customs and Border Protection drone near the Mexican border, in an area that often has incursions from Mexican drones used by drug cartels," Reuters reported last night.

The FAA closed some airspace along the border with Mexico in Fort Hancock, Texas, on Thursday with a notice announcing temporary flight restrictions for special security reasons. The restrictions are in place until June 24 but could be lifted earlier. There are conflicting reports on which day the strike happened, with The New York Times reporting that the strike occurred Thursday and Bloomberg writing that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) “was notified Wednesday after the event occurred.”

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We haven't had a new film from Gore Verbinski for nine years. But the director who brought us the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, the nightmare-inducing horror of The Ring (2002), and the Oscar-winning hijinks of Rango (2011) is back in peak form with Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die. It's a darkly satirical, inventive, and hugely entertaining time-loop adventure that also serves as a cautionary tale about our widespread online technology addiction.

(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)

Sam Rockwell stars as an otherwise unnamed man who shows up at a Norms diner in Los Angeles looking like a homeless person but claiming to be a time traveler from an apocalyptic future. He’s there to recruit the locals into his war against a rogue AI, although the diner patrons are understandably dubious about his sanity. (“I come from a nightmare apocalypse,” he assures the crowd about his grubby appearance. “This is the height of f*@ing fashion!”)

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Dan Simmons, the author of more than three dozen books, including the famed Hyperion Cantos , has died from a stroke. He was 77 .

Simmons, who worked in elementary education before becoming an author in the 1980s, produced a broad portfolio of writing that spanned several genres, including horror fiction, historical fiction, and science fiction. Often his books included elements of all of these. This obituary will focus on what is generally considered his greatest work, and what I believe is possibly the greatest science fiction novel of all time, Hyperion .

Published in 1989, Hyperion is set in a far-flung future in which human settlement spans hundreds of planets. The novel feels both familiar, in that its structure follows Chaucer's Canterbury Tales , and utterly unfamiliar in its strange, far-flung setting.

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For years now, Valve fans have been making jokes about the company's slow transition from game maker to glorified digital hat and knife paint marketplace . This week, though, a lawsuit brought by the state of New York argues that Valve's in-game loot box sales amount to an illegal gambling outfit worth tens of billions of dollars.

Lawyers who have looked into the particulars of the case tell Ars that the state faces an uphill battle in convincing courts that this portion of Valve's business legally constitutes gambling. That said, there are a few elements of the case that might make Valve legally vulnerable to the state's arguments.

What is gambling, anyway?

For a game to legally be counted as "gambling" in most jurisdictions, it has to pass a three-part test: a player has to pay money (1) for an outcome that's materially determined by chance (2) in the hopes of receiving something of value (3). While buying a key to a loot box in a Valve game easily passes those first two tests, New York's legal case will likely hinge on whether the random cosmetic items players get from those loot boxes constitute "something of value" for statutory purposes.

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The world's largest automaker has had a somewhat difficult relationship with battery-electric vehicles. Toyota was an early pioneer of hybrid powertrains, and it remains a fan today, often saying that given limited battery supply, it makes sense to build more hybrids than fewer EVs. Its first full BEV had a rocky start, suffering a recall due to improperly attached wheels just as the cars were hitting showrooms. Reviews for the awkwardly named bZ4x were mixed ; the car did little to stand out among the competition.

Toyota didn't get to be the world's largest automaker by being completely blind to feedback, and last year, it gave its EV platform (called -TNGA and shared with Lexus and Subaru) a bit of a spiff-up. To start, it simplified the name—the small electric SUV is now just called the bZ. It uses a new 74.7 kWh battery pack, available with either front- or all-wheel drive powertrains that now use silicon carbide power electronics. And for the North American market, instead of a CCS1 port just behind the front passenger wheel, you'll now see a Tesla-style NACS socket.

Our test bZ was the $37,900 XLE FWD Plus, which has the most range of any bZ at 314 miles (505 km) according to the EPA test cycle. When you realize that the pre-facelift version managed just 252 miles (405 km) with 71.4 kWh onboard, the scale of the improvement becomes clear.

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