All federal agencies received a memo Wednesday requiring the termination of remote work options, with return-to-office plans due by end of day Friday.

In the memo, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, Charles Ezell, told the heads and acting heads of all departments and agencies that the change is due to Donald Trump's Return to In-Person Work presidential memorandum, which carved out space for some exemptions and ordered:

Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of Government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary.

Empty offices a “national embarrassment”

According to the memo, "most federal offices presently are virtually abandoned," with "the vast majority of federal office workers" having "not returned to in-person work" after transitioning to remote work during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only has this "devastated" the local economy in Washington, D.C., the memo said, but having so many federal offices sitting empty also serves as a "national embarrassment."

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TikTok owner ByteDance is reportedly still searching for non-sale options to stay in the US after the Supreme Court upheld a national security law requiring that TikTok's US operations either be shut down or sold to a non-foreign adversary.

Last weekend, TikTok briefly went dark in the US, only to come back online hours later after Donald Trump reassured ByteDance that the US law would not be enforced. Then, shortly after Trump took office, he signed an executive order delaying enforcement for 75 days while he consulted with advisers to "pursue a resolution that protects national security while saving a platform used by 170 million Americans."

Trump's executive order did not suggest that he intended to attempt to override the national security law's ban-or-sale requirements. But that hasn't stopped ByteDance, board member Bill Ford told World Economic Forum (WEF) attendees, from searching for a potential non-sale option that "could involve a change of control locally to ensure it complies with US legislation," Bloomberg reported .

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The modern Doom games have been a master class in reviving a beloved retro gaming series. Both 2016's Doom and 2020's Doom Eternal paid homage to both the look and feel of the original Doom titles without being slavishly devoted to older gameplay conventions that can feel dated decades later.

Yet by the end of Doom Eternal , you could feel the modernized gameplay system threatening to burst at the seams a bit. Managing your limited ammo, health, and armor resources in Eternal meant expertly juggling a bewildering array of chainsaws, flamethrowers, grenades, and melee-based staggers into powerful, pre-animated "glory kills." That was all on top of the frequent weapon-switching needed to take advantage of the weaknesses of the varied enemies surrounding you and the double-jump-and-dash movement system that required expert use of all three dimensions.

Something had to give. So for Doom: The Dark Ages , the team at id Software has committed to a more streamlined, back-to-basics system that limits complexity while maintaining the same overall difficulty level. That means a "fewer strings on the guitar" approach to controls that narrows almost every action down to just three context-sensitive buttons, as the developers discussed in a hands-off virtual preview session attended by Ars Technica.

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It's official: The FBI's warrantless searches of communications seized to protect US national security have at last been ruled unconstitutional and in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

In a major December ruling made public this week, US District Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall settled one of the biggest debates about feared government overreach that has prompted calls to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for more than a decade.

Critics' primary concern was whether the FBI needed a warrant to search and query Americans' communications that are often incidentally, inadvertently, or mistakenly seized during investigations of suspected foreign terrorists.

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has revived three complaints against broadcast stations accused of bias against President Donald Trump.

Outgoing Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel last week directed the FCC to dismiss the complaints against CBS, ABC, and NBC stations, along with a fourth complaint about Fox, in what she called a stand for the First Amendment. Rosenworcel said the "threat to the First Amendment has taken on new forms, as the incoming President has called on the Federal Communications Commission to revoke licenses for broadcast television stations because he disagrees with their content and coverage."

But in three orders issued yesterday, the FCC Enforcement Bureau reversed the CBS, ABC, and NBC decisions. "We find that the previous order was issued prematurely based on an insufficient investigatory record for the station-specific conduct at issue," each new order said. "We therefore conclude that this complaint requires further consideration."

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Although fans of A Song of Ice and Fire might still be hankering for the long-delayed next book in the series, bestselling sci-fi/fantasy author George R.R. Martin has instead added a different item to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics paper just published in the American Journal of Physics that he co-authored. The paper derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictional virus that is the centerpiece of the Wild Cards series of books, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with some 44 authors contributing.

Wild Cards grew out of the Superworld RPG, specifically a long-running campaign game-mastered by Martin in the 1980s, with several of the original sci-fi writers who contributed to the series participating. (A then-unknown Neil Gaiman once pitched Martin a Wild Cards story involving a main character who lived in a world of dreams. Martin rejected the pitch, and Gaiman's idea became The Sandman .) Initially, Martin planned to write a novel centered on his character Turtle, but he then decided it would be better as a shared universe anthology. Martin thought that superhero comics had far too many sources of the many different superpowers and wanted his universe to have one single source. Snodgrass suggested a virus.

The series is basically an alternate history of the US in the aftermath of World War II. An airborne alien virus, designed to rewrite DNA, had been released over New York City in 1946 and spread globally, infecting tens of thousands worldwide. It's called the Wild Card virus because it affects every individual differently. It kills 90 percent of those it infects and mutates the rest. Nine percent of the latter end up with unpleasant conditions—these people are called Jokers—while 1 percent develop superpowers and are known as Aces. Some Aces have "powers" that are so trivial and useless that they are known as "deuces."

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On Tuesday, OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX announced plans to form Stargate, a new company that will invest $500 billion in AI computing infrastructure across the United States over four years. The announcement came during a White House meeting with President Donald Trump, who called it the "largest AI infrastructure project in history."

However, the origins of the Stargate project extend back to 2024 , prior to Trump beginning his second term in office, and skeptics have begun to take aim at the numbers announced.

OpenAI says the goal of Stargate is to kickstart building more data centers to expand computing capacity for current and future AI projects, including OpenAI's goal of "AGI," which the company defines as a highly autonomous AI system that "outperforms humans at most economically valuable work."

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The UK’s competition watchdog has launched an investigation into Apple's and Google’s mobile platforms, just days after the government forced out its chair as part of a push to cut the regulatory burden on business.

The Competition and Markets Authority said on Thursday it would examine whether the creators of the iPhone and Android smartphone operating systems should be subjected to extra scrutiny over how they run their mobile platforms, in its second investigation under the new digital markets regime.

The announcement comes just two days after the government ousted Marcus Bokkerink as chair of the CMA, amid concerns the regulator was not sufficiently focused on growth.

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Now 11 seasons in, Formula E has come a long way from its sometimes-chaotic early days and those mid-race pitstops to change cars. Car swaps went away a long time ago, but when the series gets back to racing next month in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the mid-race pit stop will be back. Except this time, the cars will be quickly recharged by powerful 600 kW fast chargers.

The new race feature, which Formula E is calling "pit boost," is a 30-second pitstop, during which time the car receives a 600 kW fast charge—more than twice as much power as a Tesla Supercharger—that adds 10 percent (3.85 kWh) to the battery's state of charge. It's mandatory for every car in the race, but a team is only allowed to charge one of its two cars at a time, and only within a specified window of time during the race.

Some people are probably going to be unimpressed with the length of the stops—while they're shorter than you might see at a prototype stop at Le Mans or Daytona, you also won't see mechanics running around changing tires. We're also talking an order of magnitude longer than a current Formula 1 pitstop, which will no doubt be used as ammunition by Formula E's detractors, just as the lap-time comparisons are.

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