What just happened? The Ultimate Fighting Championship has signed a multi-year, multimillion-dollar partnership that'll leverage Meta's various technologies to help the mixed martial arts organization better connect with fans. The wide-ranging deal will involve Meta platforms and services including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. The UFC will also have access to Meta Quest, Meta Glasses, and Meta AI, potentially paving the way for groundbreaking fan experiences. Speaking of Threads, Meta's answer to X will now be the official social media partner of the UFC so don't expect to see X messages featured on broadcasts any longer.Meta, meanwhile, will receive favorable brand placement during PPV and Fight Night events in the octagon and be featured during broadcasts. Fans attending live events will also be able to take part in "creative" experiences, we're told.The companies said additional elements of the partnership will be announced as the two sides work together on future innovations.The partnership isn't entirely surprising considering the relationship between UFC President Dana White and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg. In 2022, Zuckerberg started training in mixed martial arts and it wasn't long before we started seeing him sitting cageside at UFC events. He even appeared in the corner of Alexander Volkanovski at UFC 298 last year.In mid-2023, a potential MMA bout between Zuckerberg and Tesla CEO Elon Musk was floated but nothing ever came of it. Given the current climate surrounding Musk, perhaps White should revisit the matchup? They'd sell a ton of pay per views. White joined Meta's board of directors in January. // Related StoriesThe UFC was founded in 1993, with the original idea being for a tournament featuring various martial arts disciplines to see which was truly supreme. The promotion struggled mightily for years as critics deemed it too violent. US Senator John McCain famously described it as "human cockfighting."White was brought on in the early 2000s and eventually righted the ship. In 2016, WME-IMG purchased UFC parent company Zuffa for $4.025 billion.Image credit: Andrius Petrucenia

First,Tales of the Jediexplored the stories of Ahsoka Tano and Count Dooku. Then,Tales of the EmpireStar Wars: Tales of the Underworld.Disney+ and Lucasfilm released the trailer for Tales of the Underworld,the third installment in the Tales anthology series. This season spotlights two bounty hunters: Asajj Ventress and Cad Bane.Ventress has been on both sides of the spectrum, having been a Jedi Padawan and an assassin for Count Dooku. Ventress always wanted to be a Sith and fought against many Jedi during the Clone Wars, including Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker. After Dooku tried to kill her, Ventress escaped and reunited with the Nightsister clan to execute a plan for revenge. In the series, Ventress is a bounty hunter forced on the run without affiliation to the Sith or Jedi.RelatedBane is one of the top bounty hunters during the Clone Wars. Bane is a ruthless creature with a quick trigger who can shoot himself out of any situation. Bane must go toe-to-toe with a former friend who works as a marshal.Someone tells Bane, This revenge, I hope it was worth it, to which the bounty hunter replies, It will be.Lucasfilm/Disney+Tales of the Underworldstars Nika Futterman as Asajj Ventress and Corey Burton as Cad Bane. Additional voice cast includes Artt Butler, Lane Factor,AJ LoCascio, Clare Grant, Dawn-Lyen Gardner, and Eric Lopez.Lucasfilm CCO and prominent Star Wars filmmaker Dave Filoni created Tales of the Underworldand serves as the supervising director. Filoni co-wrote and produced the next live-action Star Wars movie, 2026s The Mandalorian & Grogu.Tales of the Underworldpremieres on May 4 on Disney+. Fans of Lucasfilm will know that date is also known as Star Wars Day.Editors Recommendations

Samsung is no stranger to foldable phones, with devices like the Galaxy Z Fold 7 just around the corner. Now a newly discovered patent suggests Samsungs plans for foldables go beyond what we initially expected. A post at SamMobile points to a display that folds not two, not three, but four times via three separate hinges. This would allow it to expand to a massive size, perhaps as large as most tablets.Its hard to state anything definitively from just a patent, but the included diagram gives us an idea of what the final product might look like. From initial impressions, it would be on the bulkier side of things. The central hinge is the largest of the three, and the outer panels would fold inward twice once onto themselves, and again onto the two inner halves to an end result roughly the dimensions of a modern phone, although several times thicker.Image used with permission by copyright holderAn additional diagram shows the final result. While it might be a matter of scale in the blueprint, theres no doubt this device would likely be thicker than any phone in Samsungs existing lineup.Image used with permission by copyright holderIt isnt clear how the screen configuration for this device would work. Unfolded, it would result in a tablet-style display, but it raises the question: would there be inner displays if the device was only half-folded? Additional displays not to mention the engineering required for a phone like this makes us hesitant to guess at any sort of potential price point, but it would likely be a premium phone.Recommended VideosNote that all of this is speculation. Samsung has made no official statements regarding the existence of such a device nor any indication of plans to pursue it, but the patent is an interesting development in what feels like a foldable arms race. RelatedIf Samsung does release a product like this, it would be one of the first of its kind and could eliminate the tablet market entirely if done correctly. It has a wide range of potential for productivity-focused applications, with different apps running on different sides of the display, as well as for streaming content.Editors Recommendations

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The charismatic performer was also known for playing Jim Morrison and Doc Holliday.

Trump's Signal man Not just Signal: Michael Waltz reportedly used Gmail for government messages More damaging reports for Trump official who invited journalist to Signal chat. Jon Brodkin Apr 2, 2025 1:46 pm | 50 US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz at the US military's Pituffik Space Base in Greenland on March 28, 2025. Credit: Getty Images | Jim Watson/AFP US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz at the US military's Pituffik Space Base in Greenland on March 28, 2025. Credit: Getty Images | Jim Watson/AFP Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreNational Security Advisor Michael Waltz and a senior aide used personal Gmail accounts for government communications, according to a Washington Post report published yesterday.Waltz has been at the center of controversy for weeks because he inadvertently invited The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat in which top Trump administration officials discussed a plan for bombing Houthi targets in Yemen. Yesterday's report of Gmail use and another recent report on additional Signal chats raise more questions about the security of sensitive government communications in the Trump administration.A senior Waltz aide used Gmail "for highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies involving sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict," The Washington Post wrote.The Post said it reviewed the emails. "While the NSC official used his Gmail account, his interagency colleagues used government-issued accounts, headers from the email correspondence show," the report said.Waltz himself "had less sensitive, but potentially exploitable information sent to his Gmail, such as his schedule and other work documents, said officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe what they viewed as problematic handling of information," the report said. "The officials said Waltz would sometimes copy and paste from his schedule into Signal to coordinate meetings and discussions."Separately, The Wall Street Journal described additional Signal chats in a report on Sunday about Waltz losing support inside the White House. "Two US officials also said that Waltz has created and hosted multiple other sensitive national-security conversations on Signal with cabinet members, including separate threads on how to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine as well as military operations. They declined to address if any classified information was posted in those chats," the WSJ wrote.We contacted the White House about the reported use of Gmail and Signal today and will update this article if we get a response.Waltzs denials increasingly hard to believeAccording to The Washington Post, National Security Council "spokesman Brian Hughes said he has seen no evidence of Waltz using his personal email as described and said on occasions when 'legacy contacts' have emailed him work-related materials, he makes sure to 'cc' his government email to ensure compliance with federal records laws that require officials to archive official correspondence.""Waltz didn't and wouldn't send classified information on an open account," Hughes was quoted as saying. Hughes also said that Signal is approved for government use but "acknowledged that it is not supposed to be used for classified material and insisted Waltz never used it as such."Trump administration officials previously claimed that no classified information about war plans was shared in the Signal chat that included Goldberg. The Atlantic subsequently published texts showing that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared planned strike times and information about targets and weapons before the attacks in Yemen.The Post wrote that "US officials say Trump is much more upset about the inclusion of a liberal journalist on a confidential group chat than he is about exposing secrets to foreign adversaries. But White House officials have found Waltz's denials increasingly hard to believe."Waltz denied even knowing Goldberg despite a 2021 picture of the two men standing next to each other at an event. Explaining how Goldberg might have been added to the Signal group, Waltz told Fox News, "I'm sure everybody out there has had a contact where it said one person and then a different phone number... if you have somebody else's contact, and then somehow it gets sucked in, it gets sucked in."In response, Goldberg told NBC News, "Well, this isn't The Matrix. Phone numbers don't just get sucked into other phones. I don't know what he's talking about there... He's telling everyone that he's never met me or spoken to me. That's simply not true. I understand why he's doing it but this has become a somewhat farcical situation. There's no subterfuge here. My number was in his phone, he mistakenly added me to the group chatthere we go."Jon BrodkinSenior IT ReporterJon BrodkinSenior IT Reporter Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry. 50 Comments

Tales from the digital commons AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50% Automated AI bots seeking training data threaten Wikipedia project stability, foundation says. Benj Edwards Apr 2, 2025 1:06 pm | 42 Credit: Carol Yepes and Dana Neibert via Getty Images Credit: Carol Yepes and Dana Neibert via Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreOn Tuesday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that relentless AI scraping is putting strain on Wikipedia's servers. Automated bots seeking AI model training data for LLMs have been vacuuming up terabytes of data, growing the foundation's bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content by 50 percent since January 2024. Its a scenario familiar across the free and open source software (FOSS) community, as we've previously detailed.The Foundation hosts not only Wikipedia but also platforms like Wikimedia Commons, which offers 144 million media files under open licenses. For decades, this content has powered everything from search results to school projects. But since early 2024, AI companies have dramatically increased automated scraping through direct crawling, APIs, and bulk downloads to feed their hungry AI models. This exponential growth in non-human traffic has imposed steep technical and financial costsoften without the attribution that helps sustain Wikimedias volunteer ecosystem.The impact isnt theoretical. The foundation says that when former US President Jimmy Carter died in December 2024, his Wikipedia page predictably drew millions of views. But the real stress came when users simultaneously streamed a 1.5-hour video of a 1980 debate from Wikimedia Commons. The surge doubled Wikimedias normal network traffic, temporarily maxing out several of its Internet connections. Wikimedia engineers quickly rerouted traffic to reduce congestion, but the event revealed a deeper problem: The baseline bandwidth had already been consumed largely by bots scraping media at scale.This behavior is increasingly familiar across the FOSS world. Fedoras Pagure repository blocked all traffic from Brazil after similar scraping incidents covered by Ars Technica. GNOMEs GitLab instance implemented proof-of-work challenges to filter excessive bot access. Read the Docs dramatically cut its bandwidth costs after blocking AI crawlers.Wikimedias internal data explains why this kind of traffic is so costly for open projects. Unlike humans, who tend to view popular and frequently cached articles, bots crawl obscure and less-accessed pages, forcing Wikimedias core datacenters to serve them directly. Caching systems designed for predictable, human browsing behavior dont work when bots are reading the entire archive indiscriminately.As a result, Wikimedia found that bots account for 65 percent of the most expensive requests to its core infrastructure despite making up just 35 percent of total pageviews. This asymmetry is a key technical insight: The cost of a bot request is far higher than a human one, and it adds up fast.Crawlers that evade detectionMaking the situation more difficult, many AI-focused crawlers do not play by established rules. Some ignore robots.txt directives. Others spoof browser user agents to disguise themselves as human visitors. Some even rotate through residential IP addresses to avoid blocking, tactics that have become common enough to force individual developers like Xe Iaso to adopt drastic protective measures for their code repositories.This leaves Wikimedias Site Reliability team in a perpetual state of defense. Every hour spent rate-limiting bots or mitigating traffic surges is time not spent supporting Wikimedias contributors, users, or technical improvements. And its not just content platforms under strain. Developer infrastructure, like Wikimedias code review tools and bug trackers, is also frequently hit by scrapers, further diverting attention and resources.These problems mirror others in the AI scraping ecosystem. Curl developer Daniel Stenberg has detailed how fake, AI-generated bug reports are wasting human time. SourceHuts Drew DeVault has highlighted how bots hammer endpoints like git logs, far beyond what human developers would ever need.Across the Internet, open platforms are experimenting with technical solutions: proof-of-work challenges, slow-response tarpits (like Nepenthes), collaborative crawler blocklists (like "ai.robots.txt"), and commercial tools like Cloudflare's AI Labyrinth. These approaches address the technical mismatch between infrastructure designed for human readers and the industrial-scale demands of AI training.Open commons at riskWikimedia acknowledges the importance of providing "knowledge as a service," and its content is indeed freely licensed. But as the Foundation states plainly, "Our content is free, our infrastructure is not."The organization is now focusing on systemic approaches to this issue under a new initiative: WE5: Responsible Use of Infrastructure. It raises critical questions about guiding developers toward less resource-intensive access methods and establishing sustainable boundaries while preserving openness.The challenge lies in bridging two worlds: open knowledge repositories and commercial AI development. Many companies rely on open knowledge to train commercial models but don't contribute to the infrastructure making that knowledge accessible. This creates a technical imbalance that threatens the sustainability of community-run platforms.Better coordination between AI developers and resource providers could potentially resolve these issues through dedicated APIs, shared infrastructure funding, or more efficient access patterns. Without such practical collaboration, the platforms that have enabled AI advancement may struggle to maintain reliable service. Wikimedia's warning is clear: Freedom of access does not mean freedom from consequences.Benj EdwardsSenior AI ReporterBenj EdwardsSenior AI Reporter Benj Edwards is Ars Technica's Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site's dedicated AI beat in 2022. He's also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC. 42 Comments

Roberto CignaOn a large table draped with hundreds of cables, a maze of mirrors and lenses bounces and guides a thin beam of laser light. It culminates at a silvery capsule, which holds 40,000 strontium atoms cooled to within a whisker of absolute zero. This delicate edifice is an optical clock, one of the worlds most accurate timepieces.Instruments like this arent exactly designed to be portable which makes it more than a little surprising that the operators of one such device at the German national metrology institute packed it into a trailer and sent it hurtling down a motorway. It was the start of a perilous journey: a bad jolt could disrupt the beat of its precise ticks. But it was necessary.That was because, in 2022, scientists globally agreed that we should start work on redefining the second based on our latest and greatest timekeeping technology: optical clocks. However, this meant bringing together several of the worlds best specimens for comparison.Doing so proved a huge challenge, but it will surely be worth the trouble. A new definition of the second will be profoundly consequential for nearly every other measurement that scientists use to describe nature, from speeds to masses and more. Our efforts to define it more precisely, then, will ripple out across our entire view of the world. This was the first global comparison