Last year, a study highlighted that your doctor's office might be taking your blood pressure wrong . The current best practice is to take seated blood pressure readings with a detailed protocol: Patients must not eat, drink, or exercise for 30 minutes prior; they must have an empty bladder and sit calmly for five minutes prior to the first reading; they must sit with their feet uncrossed and flat on the floor; their back should be supported; and—a big one that's often overlooked—they must keep the arm to be measured resting on a flat surface at the height of their heart, not higher or lower.

While the setup is often different from what happens in a bustling medical office, a new study blows away quibbles over protocol and suggests that even when done perfectly, the method is second-rate. We shouldn't be sitting at all when we take our blood pressure—we should be lying down.

According to the study, published in JAMA Cardiology and led by researchers at Harvard , blood pressure readings measured while lying down were significantly better at indicating risks of cardiovascular disease, stroke, heart failure, and death than were seated blood pressure readings alone.

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When New York's law requiring $15 or $20 broadband plans for people with low incomes took effect last week, Optimum customer William O'Brien tried to sign up for the cheap Internet service. Since O'Brien is in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), he qualifies for one of the affordable plans that Internet service providers must offer New Yorkers who meet income eligibility requirements.

O'Brien has been paying Optimum $111.20 a month for broadband—$89.99 for the broadband service, $14 in equipment rental fees, a $6 "Network Enhancement Fee," and $1.21 in tax. He was due for a big discount under the New York Affordable Broadband Act (ABA) , which says that any ISP with over 20,000 customers must offer either a $15 plan with download speeds of at least 25Mbps or a $20 plan with at least 200Mbps speeds, and that the price must include "any recurring taxes and fees such as recurring rental fees for service provider equipment required to obtain broadband service and usage fees."

Despite qualifying for a low-income plan under the law's criteria, O'Brien's request was denied by Optimum. He reached out to Ars, just like many other people who have read our articles about bad telecom customer service. Usually, these problems are fixed quickly after we reach out to an Internet provider's public relations department on the customer's behalf.

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Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 starts at $1,999 before you factor in upsells from the company's partners or price increases driven by scalpers and/or genuine demand. It costs more than my entire gaming PC.

The new GPU is so expensive that you could build an entire well-specced gaming PC with Nvidia's next-fastest GPU in it—the $999 RTX 5080, which we don't have in hand yet—for the same money, or maybe even a little less with judicious component selection. It's not the most expensive GPU that Nvidia has ever launched—2018's $2,499 Titan RTX has it beat, and 2022's RTX 3090 Ti also cost $2,000—but it's safe to say it's not really a GPU intended for the masses.

At least as far as gaming is concerned, the 5090 is the very definition of a halo product; it's for people who demand the best and newest thing regardless of what it costs (the calculus is probably different for deep-pocketed people and companies who want to use them as some kind of generative AI accelerator). And on this front, at least, the 5090 is successful. It's the newest and fastest GPU you can buy, and the competition is not particularly close. It's also a showcase for DLSS Multi-Frame Generation, a new feature unique to the 50-series cards that Nvidia is leaning on heavily to make its new GPUs look better than they already are.

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One of the most frequently asked questions about quantum computers is a simple one: When will they be useful?

If you talk to people in the field, you'll generally get a response in the form of another question: useful for what? Quantum computing can be applied to a large range of problems, some of them considerably more complex than others. Utility will come for some of the simpler problems first, but further hardware progress is needed before we can begin tackling some of the more complex ones.

One that should be easiest to solve involves modeling the behavior of some simple catalysts. The electrons of these catalysts, which are critical for their chemical activity, obey the rules of quantum mechanics, which makes it relatively easy to explore them with a quantum computer.

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About a year ago, security researcher Sam Curry bought his mother a Subaru, on the condition that, at some point in the near future, she let him hack it.

It took Curry until last November, when he was home for Thanksgiving, to begin examining the 2023 Impreza's Internet-connected features and start looking for ways to exploit them. Sure enough, he and a researcher working with him online, Shubham Shah, soon discovered vulnerabilities in a Subaru web portal that let them hijack the ability to unlock the car, honk its horn, and start its ignition, reassigning control of those features to any phone or computer they chose.

Most disturbing for Curry, though, was that they found they could also track the Subaru's location—not merely where it was at the moment but also where it had been for the entire year that his mother had owned it. The map of the car’s whereabouts was so accurate and detailed, Curry says, that he was able to see her doctor visits, the homes of the friends she visited, even which exact parking space his mother parked in every time she went to church.

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Welcome to Edition 7.28 of the Rocket Report! After last week's jam-packed action in the launch business, things are a bit quieter this week. Much of the space world's attention has turned to Washington as the Trump administration takes the helm of the federal government. Some of the administration's policy changes will likely impact the launch industry, with commercial spaceflight poised to become a beneficiary of actions over the next four years. As for the specifics, Ars has reported that NASA is expected to review the future of the Space Launch System rocket. Investments in the military space program could bring in more business for launch companies. And regulatory changes may reduce government oversight of commercial spaceflight.

As always, we welcome reader submissions . 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.

What happened to China's reusable rocket testbed? A Chinese state-owned company performed a rocket flight on January 18 (US time) aimed at testing reusable launch vehicle technology without announcing the outcome, Space News reports . The Longxing-2 test article lifted off from a makeshift launch area near Haiyang, Shandong province. The methane-fueled rocket was expected to fly to an altitude of 75 kilometers (about 246,000 feet) before performing a reentry burn and a landing burn to guide itself to a controlled splashdown in the Yellow Sea, replicating the maneuvers required to recover a reusable booster like the first stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9. This was China's most ambitious reusable rocket demonstration flight to date.

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When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can’t be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what’s known in the business as a “magic packet.” On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs running Juniper Network’s Junos OS has been doing just that.

J-Magic, the tracking name for the backdoor, goes one step further to prevent unauthorized access. After receiving a magic packet hidden in the normal flow of TCP traffic, it relays a challenge to the device that sent it. The challenge comes in the form of a string of text that’s encrypted using the public portion of an RSA key. The initiating party must then respond with the corresponding plaintext, proving it has access to the secret key.

Open sesame

The lightweight backdoor is also notable because it resided only in memory, a trait that makes detection harder for defenders. The combination prompted researchers at Lumin Technology’s Black Lotus Lab to sit up and take notice.

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Four out of five game developers are currently working on a project for the PC, a sizable increase from 66 percent of developers a year ago. That's according to Informa's latest State of the Game Industry survey , which partnered with Omdia to ask over 3,000 game industry professionals about their work in advance of March's Game Developers Conference.

The 80 percent of developers working on PC projects in this year's survey is by far the highest mark for any platform dating back to at least 2018, when 60 percent of surveyed developers were working on a PC game. In the years since, the ratio of game developers working on the PC has hovered between 56 and 66 percent before this year's unexpected jump. The number of game developers saying they were interested in the PC as a platform also increased substantially, from 62 percent last year to 74 percent this year.

While the PC has long been the most popular platform in this survey, the sudden jump in the last year was rather large. Credit: Kyle Orland / Informa

The PC has long been the most popular platform for developers to work on in the annual State of the Game Industry survey, easily outpacing consoles and mobile platforms that generally see active work from anywhere between 12 to 36 percent of developer respondents, depending on the year. In its report, Informa notes this surge as a "passion for PC development explod[ing]" among developers, and mentions that while "PC has consistently been the platform of choice... this year saw its dominance increase even more."

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On Thursday, OpenAI released a research preview of " Operator ," a web automation tool that uses a new AI model called Computer-Using Agent (CUA) to control computers through a visual interface. The system performs tasks by viewing and interacting with on-screen elements like buttons and text fields similar to how a human would.

Operator is available today for subscribers of the $200 per month ChatGPT Pro plan at operator.chatgpt.com . The company plans to expand to Plus, Team, and Enterprise users later. OpenAI intends to integrate these capabilities directly into ChatGPT and later release CUA through its API for developers.

Operator watches on-screen content while you use your computer and executes tasks through simulated keyboard and mouse inputs. The Computer-Using Agent processes screenshots to understand the computer's state and then makes decisions about clicking, typing, and scrolling based on its observations.

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