The 20 most-read stories on Ars Technica in 2022

When 2022 dawned, there were a few things we knew we would be writing about: The global pandemic, whatever cool things Apple and Google did, rocket launches, and cool artificial intelligence stuff. But every year offers surprises, and 2022 was no exception.

Yes, we figured there would be plenty of articles about Elon Musk on Ars Technica this year. After all, he runs SpaceX and Tesla, two companies we frequently cover. But if someone told me Musk would become "Chief Twit" and end up all over the front page of Ars due to his impulse purchase of Twitter and the... interesting decisions he's made since taking control of the company, I would've asked them to pass the dutchie on the left-hand side.

2022 has been a long, strange trip. And it's almost over.

So let's look back at what you, our readers, found the most fascinating on Ars this year.

20. Google’s past failures were on full display at I/O 2022

This was not a real slide from Google I/O 2022, but it could have been.

Credit: Google / Ron Amadeo

Google is arguably known for three things: absolutely dominating the Internet advertising market, absolutely dominating the Internet browser market, and absolutely dominating the killing-your-own-products market. At Google I/O 2022, the company decided to engage in a bit of device necromancy. Case in point: Android tablets.

The pinnacle of Google's Android tablet development was in 2011, when we saw the release of Android 3.0 Honeycomb. I'll let Ron Amadeo take it from here:

"[E]very subsequent Android release and Google app update watered down the tablet interface until it disappeared. App developers took Google's neglect as a sign that they should stop making Android tablets, too, and the ecosystem fell apart.

"After the 2015 Pixel C release, Google quit the tablet market for three years, then launched the Pixel Slate Chrome-OS tablet. It then quit the tablet market for another three years. Now it's back. Will the company's new plans produce another one-year wonder like the Pixel Slate?"

Ron went deep into Google's 2022 product strategy, and he'll be sure to report on when the new and resurrected products are killed in the future.

19. Never-before-seen malware is nuking data in Russia’s courts and mayors’ offices

In February, Russia illegally invaded Ukraine, unleashing hell on its neighbor. In addition to slinging bullets, rockets, artillery shells, and other munitions at one another, Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in bouts of cyberwarfare against one another.

Ukraine—or a group sympathetic to the country—unleashed some never-before-seen malware on Russian courts and mayors' offices across the country. Dubbed CryWiper, the malware permanently annihilates data on infected systems.

“After examining a sample of malware, we found out that this Trojan, although it masquerades as a ransomware and extorts money from the victim for ‘decrypting’ data, does not actually encrypt, but purposefully destroys data in the affected system,” according to analysis by security company Kaspersky. “Moreover, an analysis of the Trojan's program code showed that this was not a developer's mistake, but his original intention.”

As Dan Goodin put it, "Given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other geopolitical conflicts raging around the globe, the pace of wiper malware isn’t likely to slow in the coming months."

Make sure you keep all of your networks and devices locked down tight... just because that's the smart way to do it.

18. How Apple, Google, and Microsoft will kill passwords and phishing in one stroke

Speaking of locking down your stuff, one bit of good news in 2022 was the arrival of passwordless authentication. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and some other tech firms are all on board with it. Best of all, it's less painful than regularly changing your password or using multifactor authentication. Users can store a single token that will authenticate them on any service from the Big Three, plus every other company that supports it.

Here's how it works:

"The linchpin to this scheme is something called 'multi-device credentials' or, more colloquially, 'passkeys,' introduced in updates to the existing FIDO, WebAuthn, and CTAP standards for authentication. As the name suggests, the credential works across all devices, whether you're running iOS, Android, or Windows, and across all Apple, Google, or Microsoft services.

"To make passkey authentications immune to phishing and other common forms of credential theft, the phone or other device storing the credential must be in proximity to the device the user is using to log in. A Bluetooth connection allows the two devices to exchange information that ensures the device logging in is near the end user rather than a remote threat actor. It also allows the authenticating device to ensure that the machine logging in is connected to the legitimate URL rather than an imposter attempting to gain unauthorized access."

For the full story on how it all works, check out Dan's excellent and in-depth write-up.

17. The world’s oldest pants are a 3,000-year-old engineering marvel

Credit: Wagner et al. 2022

The world's oldest pants belonged to a warrior now called Turfan Man. He lived in China between 1200 and 1000 BCE, and he paired his pants with a poncho that belted around the waist, an adorned wool headband, and ankle-high boots. The other grave goods found at his burial site indicate that he probably was a horseback-mounted warrior. But back to the pants—what's so amazing about them isn't that they survived, but how they were made:

"The Turfan trousers are an extremely functional design, but they’re also pretty damn fancy. As the weaver was working on that stretchy, roomy crotch piece, they alternated different colors of weft threads to create pairs of brown stripes on an off-white background. Zigzag stripes adorn the ankles and calves of the pants, along with a design similar to a step pyramid. That pattern led Wagner and her colleagues to speculate that Turfan Man’s culture might have had some contact with people in Mesopotamia, leading them to include ziggurats in a woven motif."

16. Parents sue TikTok after 7 kids die from profitable Blackout Challenge videos

Kids have been doing stupid things they see online for as long as kids have been online. A particularly tragic instance of this occurred this year when TikTok was sued by the parents of two children, ages 8 and 9, who died after trying to emulate "Blackout Challenge" videos that TikTok's algorithm apparently recommended.

While TikTok has denied culpability, saying that the "disturbing challenge" predated its platform and had never become a "TikTok trend." But the lawsuit paints a different picture, accusing the social media giant of deciding not to take any action to limit the exposure of children to the challenge by using age and identification verification.

"Instead of exploring any of those options, the complaint says TikTok did nothing despite knowing 'the deadly "Blackout Challenge" was spreading through their app and that their algorithm was specifically feeding the "Blackout Challenge" to children, including those who have died.' It says TikTok basically did the opposite by specifically determining that the Blackout Challenge was content 'appropriate and fitting for small children.'"

15. Netflix adds “extra home” fee, will block usage in other homes if you don’t pay

Password sharing is commonplace for subscribers of popular streaming services. But the streaming services hate the practice, as they'd rather have a new paying customer than an additional user on an existing account. Netflix began its crackdown on password sharing this year. A new extra member fee of $2-$3 per month was trialed in Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru, with plans to expand it if it went well.

In July, the streaming giant added another fee for customers who share their accounts. The "extra home" fee of $2.99 per month will be charged to accounts with logins outside of the primary home. Netflix launched the extra-home fee in Central America, with plans to roll it out worldwide in early 2023. The Netflix Homes FAQ explains how it will work:

Users "can watch Netflix on your laptop or mobile device while traveling" and "watch Netflix on a TV outside your home for up to two weeks as long as your account has not been previously used in that location. This is allowed once per location per year."

If your relationship status has changed, now is a good time to change your Netflix password.

14. After ruining Android messaging, Google says iMessage is too powerful

Apple's green versus blue bubble explainer from its website.

Credit: Apple

In my nearly two decades at Ars, I've been through the CPU wars (RISC vs. CISC, baby), the desktop OS wars (macOS vs. Windows vs. Linux), and the mobile OS wars. What I didn't anticipate is that two industry giants would skirmish over mobile phone messaging. But that's what happened in January when Google launched a broadside against Apple over iMessage.

"iMessage should not benefit from bullying," said Google's official Twitter account. "Texting should bring us together, and the solution exists. Let's fix this as one industry."

A Google VP joined in, saying, "Apple's iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy. Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing. The standards exist today to fix this."

While the popularity of Apple's iMessage is undeniable, Google has shot itself in the foot over the years. Check out Ron Amadeo's explainer to understand why.

13. Every ISP in the US has been ordered to block three pirate streaming services

In addition to fighting piracy, record labels, cable networks, and movie studios have all had to adjust their business models in ways that have actually benefited consumers. But at the end of the day, the US federal courts are still a key part of the war against infringement.

In April, a federal judge ordered every ISP in the US to block three pirate streaming sites: Israel.tv, Israeli-tv.com, and Sdarot.tv. The ruling specifically called out 96 ISPs, but the judge made clear in their order that every ISP in the country needs to block those sites even if they weren't named in the judge's order.

While the sites are offline and the domains are now in the hands of the plaintiffs, the Doe defendants were never identified or showed up in court.

12. iPhone 14 and 14 Pro review: A picture is worth a thousand dollars

From left to right: the iPhone 14, the iPhone 14 Pro, and the iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Credit: Samuel Axon

Every year Apple releases a new version of iOS, its mobile operating system. Every year we review it. And every year, you readers pore over the details to see what's new from Cupertino.

When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, he touted its ability to tuck three different functions into a single device: an iPod, an Internet communications device, and a mobile phone. Since 2007, the point-and-click digital camera has arguably taken on equal importance, as Samuel Axon pointed out in his review.

"For all the noise Apple has made about these revolutionary new cameras, they're just an evolutionary step up from last year's models. Look at the multi-year picture, though, and it's crystal clear: the gains are huge over time, especially for low light."

11. macOS 13 Ventura: The Ars Technica review

The same goes for macOS, especially since Apple has been steadily incorporating features of its mobile OS into its desktop OS, as Andrew Cunningham pointed out in his review.

"But when was the last time that the Finder, the Dock, or the Menu Bar was given a substantial, non-cosmetic rethink? When did Apple last make major improvements to the way that windows coexist on a given screen? The Mac does get new under-the-hood features that are specific to it, but the headline features are mostly iOS and iPadOS imports, especially this year."

2022 may have been a low-key year for Mac software, but Ventura has some useful new features. And as is always the case, Apple made some changes that longtime users will find frustrating—I'd like the old System Preferences app back, please.

10. Couple bought home in Seattle, then learned Comcast Internet would cost $27,000

Despite the Federal Communication Commission's insistence that broadband is an "information service" and not a utility, it's really a life necessity at this point in history. The US has made strides when it comes to increasing the reach of broadband, and more Americans have a real choice when it to ISPs. (I can now get gigabit Internet from three different ISPs.)

But some folks aren't so lucky. And the unluckiest of all are those who have been told they can get broadband at their location but actually cannot. That was the case for Zachary Cohn and Lauryl Zenobi, who bought a house in Seattle. All six of their neighbors who share a property line had Comcast, but Cohn and Zenobi's home was never connected to Comcast's cable network. And Comcast wanted to charge them $27,000 to hook them up:

"Comcast ultimately said it would require installing 181 feet of underground cable to connect the house and that the couple would have to pay Comcast over $27,000 to make that happen," wrote Jon Brodkin. "Cohn and Zenobi did not pay the $27,000, and they've been relying on a 4G hotspot ever since."

With Starlink unlikely to work due to a large number of trees around their home and 5G not currently available, Cohn and Zenobi are stuck making do with 4G.

"Not having a reliable, consistent Internet connection in the year 2022 is very problematic," Cohn said.

9. Astronomers now say the rocket about to strike the Moon is not a Falcon 9

In January, astronomers began tracking the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket. They were sure it would strike the Moon in early March, and Eric Berger's original story launched a firestorm of criticism at SpaceX for not properly disposing of its rocket.

But it turns out we were all wrong. It's not a Falcon 9, but a Chinese rocket. The Chang'e 5-T1 mission was launched in 2014 on a Long March 3C rocket, and it turns out that its trajectory and launch window are "almost an exact match" for the rocket that ended up hitting the Moon in March.

The case of mistaken identity came from an unidentified object in space spotted back in 2015. It was given the temporary name of WE0913A, and the SpaceX launch seemed a logical fit due to its brightness, timing, and orbit. But a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer realized that WE0913A was not a SpaceX rocket after all.

8. Spotify support buckles under complaints from angry Neil Young fans

Credit: Getty Images | Raymond Boyd

One contributing cause to the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic was misinformation. It was seemingly all over the place, and it undoubtedly made a bad situation worse.

One frequent source of misinformation was Joe Rogan's podcast, which has a massive reach on Spotify. Rocker Neil Young did not want to share the same platform as Rogan, so he told Spotify that it needed to choose between him and Rogan. Spotify chose Rogan and pulled Young's entire catalog off its streaming service.

This did not sit well with Young fans, who hammered Spotify's customer support in addition to getting #SpotifyDeleted to trend on Twitter for a minute.

“We’re currently getting a lot of contacts so may be slow to respond,” a banner read on the support page. Live chat with customer service or a chatbot were no longer an option. All frustrated users could do to message the company was select Options, which previously included live chat with a customer support agent or a chatbot but were down to a single email address link.

“When I left Spotify, I felt better,” Young wrote on his website. “I support free speech. I have never been in favor of censorship. Private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information. I am happy and proud to stand in solidarity with the front line health care workers who risk their lives every day to help others.”

Young's catalog remains unavailable on Spotify, but COVID misinformation is only part of the reason—Young famously launched the PonoPlayer in 2014 with a focus on high-bitrate files.

7. Breaking down how USB4 goes where no USB standard has gone before

Ars Technica and the original Bondi Blue iMac both arrived on the scene during the summer of 1998. One of the defining features of the iMac was the lack of serial ports, which were jettisoned in favor of the newfangled USB.

Nearly a quarter-century later, Ars, the iMac, and USB are still around. But we've come a long way from the 12Mbps speeds of USB in 1998, as Scharon Harding explained in her dive into USB4.

USB4 uses the USB-C connectors that are becoming ubiquitous (especially once Apple complies with the EU's directive to ditch its Lightning cable in favor of USB-C), but offers dynamic bandwidth allocations and speeds of up to 40Gbps.

Read Scharon's explainer to learn all the important stuff about USB4.

6. With Stable Diffusion, you may never believe what you see online again

One of the best things Ars did in 2022 was hiring Benj Edwards to cover the ever-growing artificial intelligence beat. Judging by the traffic on his AI stories, our readers agree.

In September, we did a deep dive into Stable Diffusion, an open source AI image generator. And the Internet went wild over it, as Benj explains:

"In the past week alone, dozens of projects that take Stable Diffusion in radical new directions have sprung up. And people have achieved unexpected results using a technique called "img2img" that has "upgraded" MS-DOS game art, converted Minecraft graphics into realistic ones, transformed a scene from Aladdin into 3D, translated childlike scribbles into rich illustrations, and much more. Image synthesis may bring the capacity to richly visualize ideas to a mass audience, lowering barriers to entry while also accelerating the capabilities of artists that embrace the technology, much like Adobe Photoshop did in the 1990s."

Stable Diffusion uses a massive set of images scraped from the Internet and trains itself on a cluster of high-end GPUs. During the training process, the model then associates words with images and gradually gets better at associating images with words and concepts. The results can be stunning... even if the hands are often very weird.

5. Redditor acquires decommissioned Netflix cache server with 262TB of storage

Credit: PoisonWaffle3 / Reddit

Nothing gets the Internet excited like mysterious hardware. Case in point: a 2013-era Netflix cache server found by a redditor earlier this year.

The "Open Connect Appliance" was once a part of Netflix's massive content delivery network, Open Connect. Open Connect consists of servers installed in the data centers of ISPs that contain local copies of Netflix shows and movies.

In a vacuum, a 9-year-old server wouldn't be all that interesting. But when PoisonWaffle3 cracked open their cache server, they found some interesting hardware: a SuperMicro motherboard, an Intel Xeon CPU (E5 2650L v2), 64GB of DDR3 RAM, 36 7.2TB Western Digital hard disks (7,200 RPM), six 500GB Micron SSDs, a pair of 750-Watt power supplies, and one quad-port 10-gigabit Ethernet NIC card. (That's 262TB of raw storage for those keeping score at home.)

"We are retiring/replacing quite a few 2013 era Netflix OCA caches, and I was offered one," PoisonWaffle3 wrote. "Of course, I couldn't say no."

I wouldn't, either.

4. Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

We already had one story about a would-be Comcast customer who couldn't get service from the largest ISP in the US. Here's another, but with a different twist.

Last year, we wrote about Michigander Jared Mauch, who built his own fiber-to-the-home ISP after Comcast told him it would cost $50,000 to run service to his home. Jon Brodkin checked in with Mauch over the summer and found that his fiber ISP has more than doubled its customer base. He was providing fiber broadband to about 70 customers in his area and had plans to extend his network with Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds.

Washtenaw County, where Mauch lives, was given $71 million by the US government from the recovery funds, a portion of which was dedicated to broadband. When the county issued RFPs looking for contractors to expand broadband to unserved areas, Mauch jumped in.

"They had this gap-filling RFP, and in my own wild stupidity or brilliance, I'm not sure which yet, I bid on the whole project [in my area] and managed to win through that competitive bidding process," Mauch told Jon.

Washtenaw Fiber Properties LLC planned to add another 38 miles of fiber to its existing 14 miles to complete the project. And customers will get 100Mbps symmetrical service with unlimited data for $55 a month. Not bad.

3. Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year

2022 may go down as the year companies realized that it was hard to make money with voice assistants. That was the case for Amazon.

Amazon began laying off up to 10,000 people this fall, and the Alexa unit was hit particularly hard. Here's how Ron Amadeo described the situation:

"Alexa has been around for 10 years and has been a trailblazing voice assistant that was copied quite a bit by Google and Apple. Alexa never managed to create an ongoing revenue stream, though, so Alexa doesn't really make any money.

"The Alexa division is part of the 'Worldwide Digital' group along with Amazon Prime video, and Business Insider says that division lost $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, with 'the vast majority' of the losses blamed on Alexa. That is apparently double the losses of any other division, and the report says the hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year. It sounds like Amazon is tired of burning through all that cash."

Is time running out for the voice assistants? While they are highly unlikely to disappear from the market, Amazon, Apple, and Google have all realized that they won't turn into moneymakers any time soon—if ever.