However, some British iPhone owners are concerned about potential security and privacy risks associated with the proliferation of age checks.

“Myself and everyone I know… are doing everything to bypass these over-reaching age checks,” said one Reddit user in a discussion about Apple’s update. “I definitely do not want to grant my OS permission to decide that I’m happy to share my proven age status, under any situation.”

Apple did not respond to a request for comment about which services its new age checks will cover.

After upgrading to the latest version of iOS 26.4, iPhone owners in the UK will be presented with several options to prove their age, including checking the credit card stored in their digital wallet or taking a photo of their driving license or passport. Apple can also use the length of time that digital accounts have been active to confirm a customer’s age.

After installing the update, an on-screen notice tells users: “UK law requires you to confirm you are an adult to change content restrictions.”

Failure to complete the age check will limit which apps the user can access or download, though Apple’s support pages do not specify all of the affected services.

“Adults will have to confirm that they’re 18 or older to use certain services or features, or take certain actions on their account,” an Apple support page states.

Ofcom said it had “worked closely with Apple” and other services to protect users.

“This will build on the strong foundations of the Online Safety Act, from widespread age checks that keep young people away from harmful content, to blocking high-risk sites and stepping up action against child sexual abuse material,” the UK regulator said.

© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/apple-begins-age-checks-in-the-uk-with-latest-ios-update/

Saleem Ali, an environmental systems scientist at the University of Delaware who also provides research and advice on critical metals to the United Nations, says that deep-sea mining should be part of discussions on the green transition. He coauthored a 2022 analysis, funded by The Metals Company, that compared mining waste from terrestrial deposits to that of seabed resources. (Ali says he has never received direct funding from The Metals Company.) For example, the analysis looked at the impact of terrestrial mine tailings on water pollution and local biodiversity, and at the anticipated pollution from nodule mining, such as seabed sediment kicked into the water column by harvesting machines. It suggests that both types of mining will have effects on biodiversity, but deep-sea mining could result in less waste and fewer risks for communities than terrestrial mining. The study cautions, however, that its conclusions are limited by “substantial uncertainty” regarding impacts of sediment plumes.

Ali adds that the International Seabed Authority has been collecting data for at least 30 years, which should be sufficient to develop rules and regulations to govern seabed mining even if it’s unclear what the long-term impacts are, and whether the environmental impacts are likely to be better or worse than mining on land.

“I’m not saying that we should go ahead with it. I’m saying that it deserves to be considered in this broad context of very difficult choices we have to make,” he says.

But opponents calling for moratoriums or bans note that the same study that The Metals Company refers to as evidence of quick recovery eventually reached more pessimistic conclusions from its data as a whole. “The effects of polymetallic nodule mining are likely to be long term,” the authors wrote, and the analyses “show considerable negative biological effects of seafloor nodule mining, even at the small scale of test mining experiments.” Scientists are concerned that deep-sea organisms, which are adapted to living in a dark, quiet, and sparsely populated environment, will not cope well with the noise and light disturbances from mining. The organisms will also be exposed to toxic metals and plumes of sediment that can interfere with feeding and breathing. The Metals Company did not respond to several requests for comment.

The seafloor of Clarion-Clipperton Zone is home to many creatures, some of which are shown here: anemone (top left), sea cucumber, Psychropotes longicauda (top right), sea urchin Plesiodiadema sp. (bottom right), and starfish (bottom left). The biology and ecology of these depths remain poorly understood, making it hard to know what the ecological impacts of deep-sea mining would be.

Credit: ROV TEAM / GEOMAR (CC-BY 4.0)

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/mining-the-deep-ocean/

The DOE spokesperson said its radiation standards “are aligned with Gold Standard Science… with a focus on protecting people and the environment while avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.”

The department has already decided to abandon the long-standing radiation protection principle known as “ALARA”—the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” standard—which directs anyone dealing with radioactive materials to minimize exposure.

It often pushes exposure well below legal thresholds. Many experts agreed that the ALARA principle was sometimes applied too strictly, but the move to entirely throw it out was opposed by many prominent radiation health experts.

Whether the agencies will actually change the legal thresholds for radiation exposure is an open question, said sources familiar with the deliberations.

Internal DOE documents arguing for changing dose rules cite a report produced at the Idaho National Laboratory, which was compiled with the help of the AI assistant Claude. “It’s really strange,” said Kathryn Higley, president of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, a congressionally chartered group studying radiation safety. “They fundamentally mistake the science.”

John Wagner, the head of the Idaho National Laboratory and the report’s lead author, acknowledged to ProPublica that the science over changing radiation exposure rules is hotly contested. “We recognize that respected experts interpret aspects of this literature differently,” he wrote. His analysis was not meant to be the final word, he said, but was “intended to inform debate.”

The impact of radiation levels at very low doses is hard to measure, so the US has historically struck a cautious note. Raising dose limits could put the US out of step with international standards.

For his part, Cohen has told the nuclear industry that he sees his job as making sure the government “is no longer a barrier” to them.

In June, he shot down the notion of companies putting money into a fund for workplace accidents. “Put yourself in the shoes of one of these startups,” he said. “They’re raising hundreds of millions of dollars to do this. And then they would have to go to their VCs and their board and say, listen, guys, we actually need a few hundred million dollars more to put into a trust fund?”

He also suggested that regulators should not fret about preparing for so-called 100-year events—disasters that have roughly a 1 percent chance of taking place but can be catastrophic for nuclear facilities.

“When SpaceX started building rockets, they sort of expected the first ones to blow up,” he said.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Read the original story here. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Pratheek Rebala and Kirsten Berg contributed research.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/doge-goes-nuclear-how-trump-invited-silicon-valley-into-americas-nuclear-power-regulator/

On Friday, a jury in California determined that Elon Musk had misled investors in Twitter via public statements that depressed the price of the company’s stock ahead of Musk’s purchase of the service. Because this was a class action lawsuit, Musk is likely to owe damages to a huge range of investors—payments that may ultimately reach billions of dollars.

In the lead-up to Musk’s ultimate purchase of the social media platform, he made a number of comments on the platform itself and while appearing as a guest on a podcast, largely focused on the alleged prevalence of bot accounts on the platform. This raised fears that the deal wouldn’t go through and depressed the price of Twitter’s shares, causing some investors to sell shares at a depressed price during this period.

A number of those investors started a suit that was certified as a class action, claiming that the statements defrauded them and that Musk made them intentionally as part of a larger scheme. The jury rejected arguments about this larger scheme but found Musk liable for the tweets.

While damages have yet to be determined, lawyers for the plaintiffs reportedly say that they could ultimately reach as high as $2.6 billion.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/jury-agrees-that-musks-tweets-during-twitter-takeover-constituted-fraud/

When applying the UHF discount, Nexstar was at 39 percent prior to the merger and is now at 54.5 percent. In the merger-approval order issued by its Media Bureau, the Carr FCC found that it has authority to waive the rule and said that considering waivers on a case-by-case basis “gives us the opportunity to analyze whether a particular transaction would benefit the public, such as through increased investment in local news coverage and other programming of local interest.”

The FCC also waived its Local Television Ownership Rule to let Nexstar own more than two full-power TV stations in 23 market areas, subject to six station divestitures Nexstar committed to make in Denver, Colorado; Indianapolis, Indiana; New Haven, Connecticut; Portsmouth, Virginia; Slidell, Louisiana; and Rogers, Arkansas.

The merger was challenged in a lawsuit filed this week by attorneys general from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, and Virginia. The merger “would create the largest broadcast station group in the United States, putting more broadcast programming in the hands of fewer people, removing control from the communities they report to, cutting local jobs, and significantly impacting the delivery of news and other media content to Americans nationwide,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office said.

Nexstar and Tegna together own 221 Big Four stations, or about half of the stations affiliated with FOX, NBC, ABC, or CBS, the states said. The state AGs today asked a federal judge in California to issue a temporary restraining order to prohibit Nexstar and Tegna from integrating or commingling the companies’ assets and to require Nexstar “to hold separate the acquired Tegna assets pending further proceedings.”

Only Congress can lift 39 percent cap, opponents say

In 2004, Congress amended the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to require the FCC to raise the national audience reach limit from 35 to 39 percent. The 2004 law change also said the FCC cannot use its forbearance authority under Section 10 of the Communications Act to forbear from applying telecom regulations to entities that exceed the 39 percent limit.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/fcc-lets-nexstar-buy-tegna-creating-trump-approved-broadcaster-reaching-80-of-us/

Privacy advocates warned during the 2024 debate that the bill would let the federal government access communications equipment used by almost any business in the US. At yesterday’s hearing, Wyden said the 2024 FISA renewal “expanded the type of companies and individuals who could be forced to assist the government in its spying,” and asked Hartman whether “this expansion resulted in any intelligence.”

Hartman answered that the “provision provided us an ability to collect foreign intelligence on personnel outside of the United States,” but declined to discuss more specifics in public. “I would prefer to talk to you about exact specifics in the closed session,” Hartman said to Wyden.

FISA expansion may not have produced much intel

The 2024 update to the law imposed requirements on any “service provider who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications,” with exceptions for public accommodation facilities, dwellings, community facilities, and food service establishments. While the law’s wording is broad, the language was reportedly intended to compel operators of data centers to comply with the warrantless surveillance program.

Wyden argued that the 2024 update let the government collect data from “anybody with access to a cable box, a Wi-Fi router, or a server,” and said that Hartman’s response indicated the change did not lead to any valuable intelligence. “This ought to be a warning to every senator that not every new spying power that is sold as urgent and critical actually is,” Wyden said.

Hartman subsequently clarified that “nothing in [Section] 702 gives us the authority to target an American with a cable router or a Wi-Fi device.”

We don’t know whether the topic was addressed further in a closed session, but Wyden’s office told Ars that he was not satisfied with Hartman’s answer. “Not only was the controversial 2024 FISA expansion written so broadly that it gave the government expansive new authority to compel Americans to assist with government surveillance, yesterday the NSA would not even claim that it produced a single piece of intelligence,” Wyden said in a statement provided to Ars. “Congress must repeal this expansion, which is ripe for abuse by the executive branch.”

Separately, the NSA in 2024 admitted buying records from data brokers detailing which websites and apps Americans use.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/fbi-started-buying-americans-location-data-again-kash-patel-confirms/

Most of the cops were offended by the nicknames that Afroman assigned them. But none of them could prove that anything Afroman said was false or caused them economic harm.

In Afroman’s memo, he counted the most surprising times when cops failed to prove his exaggerated statements weren’t true. For example, one officer, Randy Walters, was offended that Afroman said he slept with his wife, but curiously did not testify that this was false. Instead, Walters only testified that “he would hope that his wife would not have extramarital affairs,” Afroman’s memo said.

“The use of his word, hope, is nebulous and renders the statement by the Defendant such that the truth cannot be proven,” the memo said. “If that cannot be proven, then it is an opinion.”

Amusing many social media onlookers, at the trial, Walters—whom Afroman called “Gomer Pyle” after the slow-to-pick-up-on-things Andy Griffith Show character—also testified that there was no way to prove he wasn’t a “son of a bitch.” His mother had been dead “for years,” Walters testified.

Similarly, Newland testified that while “nasty,” he believed that Afroman’s insults were based on the rapper’s opinions. And in Phillips’ case, Afroman’s comments were deemed impolite but not defamatory. Additionally, Shawn Cooley, the subject of Afroman’s hit “Lemon Pound Cake,” testified that no reasonable person would think that “Officer Pound Cake” was a “major misrepresentation” of his character, Afroman’s memo said.

“In Ohio, allegedly defamatory statements that constitute opinion enjoy an absolute privilege and may not give rise to a cause of action for defamation,” Afroman successfully argued.

For anyone looking for clips from the trial, you can practically watch the whole thing on independent journalist Meghann Cuniff’s Instagram. Clips include testimony from Afroman and each officer, as well as lawyers arguing what Judge Jonathan Hein called “an emotional case.”

Among those clips is one of Afroman’s lawyer, Osborne, reminding jurors that Afroman “exaggerates for the sake of entertainment. That’s who he is. I’m not going to say it’s tasteful to everyone, but some people do find it entertaining.”

“A reasonable person knows that people can post opinions, social commentary, and hurtful things all over the Internet, and it is just to be expected. That’s why we are supposed to use our own filter, use our common sense, use our experiences in life,” Osborne said.

Ars updated this story on Thursday to remove a line that confused a reference to jury instructions in Afroman’s memo with legal analysis.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/afroman-keeps-trolling-cops-after-winning-lemon-pound-cake-defamation-case/

Why officials want to go after platforms, not users

Officials “want to introduce a new ban on so-called ‘nudifier’ systems that use AI to create or manipulate images that are sexually explicit or intimate and resemble an identifiable real person without that person’s consent,” the press release explained. However, “the ban would not apply to AI systems with effective safety measures preventing users from creating such images,” officials said.

As Bloomberg noted, the ban would radically shift the EU’s approach to regulating explicit deepfakes, moving beyond just prosecuting users to also punishing platforms. The Grok scandal “epitomized” why such a regulatory shift was needed, Bloomberg reported, noting that “this amendment is the first” EU policy “to specifically target AI platforms” that produce and allow sharing of “sexual material without the subject’s consent.”

While EU officials did not directly mention Grok in the press release, regulators had already been probing the AI system while pondering the implications of xAI’s controversy for other, less visible nudify apps. Submitting questions to the European Commission earlier this year, lawmakers warned:

Recent shocking reports of AI-powered nudity applications, such as Grok on X, but also other tools that are freely available online, highlight an increase in AI-driven tools that allow users to generate manipulated intimate images of individuals without their consent, facilitating gender-based cyberviolence and the creation of child sexual abuse material.

“These systems should be banned from the EU market,” lawmakers urged, particularly since “individual perpetrators”—who “can often be punished under national criminal law”—“are often hard to find.” A more proactive plan, lawmakers suggested, would be to “prevent widespread image-based sexual violence from the outset.”

With apparent backing from Parliament members, the amendment’s likely passage is sure to frustrate Musk, who is also facing legal challenges in the US seeking injunctions against Grok’s nudify outputs. In January, a mother of one of Musk’s children, Ashley St. Clair, became one of the first victims to file a lawsuit. And more recently, three young girls in Tennessee filed a proposed class action representing all children harmed by Grok’s alleged CSAM outputs.

In the EU, similar public pressure is mounting for regulators to intervene, as xAI seems unwilling to prevent Grok from undressing real people. A civil liberties committee member, Michael McNamara, said in the press release that he believes the proposal to ban nudify apps “is something that our citizens expect.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/eu-moves-to-ban-nudify-apps-after-grok-made-them-mainstream/

In the US, the economics of coal power generation are marginal at best, and a large number of coal plants have shut down as cheaper renewables and natural gas have surged. The Trump administration has used a number of methods to swim against this economic tide, the simplest of which has been to order plants scheduled for closure to remain operational.

The Department of Energy has used the Federal Power Act and a Trump executive order declaring an energy emergency to block the closure of coal plants nationwide. The orders requiring plants to stay open have been accompanied by a steady stream of triumphal press releases, suggesting that the Department of Energy was taking the step solely to ensure grid reliability.

The latest of these releases, issued on Monday, pertains to a plant in Centralia, Washington, that was scheduled to close last year to be converted into natural gas generation. A Department of Energy emergency order had kept it operational over the winter, but that order was set to expire yesterday. With yesterday’s new order, the plant will remain operational through mid-June. According to the press release, the action was taken “to ensure Americans in the Northwestern region of the United States have access to affordable, reliable, and secure electricity.”

In response, the Environmental Defense Fund checked the generating stats for the area served by the TransAlta Centralia Coal Plant, which is the last remaining coal plant on its segment of the grid. According to Energy Information Administration data, coal contributed just 8 megawatt-hours in January and February, an amount of energy the solar panels on my house can produce in roughly eight months. This, the EDF said, is consistent with the plant simply maintaining the capacity to come back online.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/coal-plant-forced-to-stay-open-due-to-emergency-order-isnt-even-running/

Despite its complaints about the size of the fine, Cloudflare said the principles at stake “are even larger” than the financial penalty. “Piracy Shield is an unsupervised electronic portal through which an unidentified set of Italian media companies can submit websites and IP addresses that online service providers registered with Piracy Shield are then required to block within 30 minutes,” Cloudflare said.

Cloudflare warns of “widespread overblocking”

Cloudflare said Piracy Shield relies on a system provided to Italy’s government by SP Tech, an arm of the law firm that represents Serie A and other major beneficiaries of the law. The system has no judicial oversight, transparency, due process, or redress for erroneous blocking, Cloudflare said.

“Global connectivity is too important to be governed by ‘black boxes’ with 30-minute deadlines that result in widespread overblocking with no means of redress,” Cloudflare said.

AGCOM rejected Cloudflare’s arguments when it issued the fine, saying that the required blocking would impose no risk on legitimate websites because the targeted IP addresses were all uniquely intended for copyright infringement. AGCOM also said in January that Piracy Shield had disabled over 65,000 domain names and about 14,000 IP addresses in AGCOM in the previous two years.

Cloudflare and others have pointed to failures with Piracy Shield, such as a mistaken blocking of Google Drive in October 2024. Google has also been ordered to block pirate sites at the DNS level. In a September 2025 report, researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands found “hundreds of legitimate websites unknowingly affected by blocking” in what they called “a conservative lower-bound estimate.”

AGCOM decisions can be appealed in the Regional Administrative Court of Lazio in Rome. As for what happens if Cloudflare loses the appeal, the company previously threatened to discontinue certain services in Italy and remove all of its servers from the country.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/cloudflare-appeals-piracy-shield-fine-hopes-to-kill-italys-site-blocking-law/