Enlarge / The new film Clerks III appears to be a joint production. (credit: Lionsgate)

After years of development, the snootchiest of '90s bootchies will finally return to theaters this September. Writer and director Kevin Smith unveiled the first look at Clerks III on Wednesday via a two-minute trailer, though you'll have to look at some fine print to figure out exactly when and where you might get to watch this feature-length film.

The core cast featured in 2006's Clerks II returns to modern-day New Jersey, once again relegated to a building that houses both a convenience store and a video rental shop. The latter has adapted to a modern video-streaming world, at least, with a massive "THC" indicator poorly taped over the original sign—and longtime series jesters Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) seem fine hanging out in front of this adjusted storefront for some reason. But time hasn't been kind to Randal (Jeff Anderson), as the trailer shows him suffering a heart attack and questioning a life spent watching movies all day.

“What am I, a hack?”

"I always thought you could've made a cool movie," his longtime pal Dante (Brian O'Halloran) points out in an emergency room. The duo then spends the rest of the trailer trying to produce a film inside of the adjacent shops they work at, apparently assisted by a new-to-the-series pair of goths. These two new youngsters ask what the movie's about, only to be told, "It's about him working here." One goth replies flatly, "Meta."

Enlarge (credit: royyimzy | iStock / Getty Images Plus )

Censoring peaceful protesters isn’t the only reason governments have deliberately shut down the Internet in 2022, but researchers say it is the primary objective and is costing the most to the global economy.

According to a report from Top10VPN, the cost of government-ordered Internet shutdowns in 2022 has cost the global economy more than $10 billion. That figure nearly doubles 2021 costs, and it’s only halfway through the year.

At a cost of $8.77 billion, the biggest drain on the global economy is Russia. That country’s ongoing social media blackouts began shortly after the Ukraine invasion and are designed to limit peaceful protest and press freedoms by preventing access to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It's Wednesday, which means it's time for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best deals from around the web includes a handful of early discounts Amazon has set live ahead of its annual Prime Day promotion , which is scheduled to begin next week.

This is still Prime Day, so several of the early deals Amazon has on offer aren't exactly winners: There are various discounts on middling TVs and less-recommended Amazon devices like the Halo View fitness tracker or Fire TV Cube media streamer. The pickings should improve during Prime Day proper, and as usual the Dealmaster will be sorting through the junk to help you find what's good next week.

That said, we are seeing a few deals of note at the moment, including the lowest prices we've tracked for the diminutive Echo Show 5 smart display (which is down to $35 ), the Kindle Kids e-reader—which, at $50 , is a good value for those who don't want to pay up for the superior Kindle Paperwhite (which isn't discounted yet)—and the Echo and Echo Dot smart speakers, which are down to $60 and $20 , respectively. (Just be completely sure you're willing to accept the myriad privacy and security risks with the latter two.) The extended Audible Premium Plus trial we noted last week , which gives new subscribers three months of service for no extra cost, is still available as well. There are a couple other deals of note that we've highlighted below; remember that you'll need to be a Prime member to take advantage.

Enlarge / A row of Tesla EVs charging at one of the company's Supercharger fast charging locations. (credit: Don and Melinda Crawford/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

These days Tesla gets a lot of flak , but sometimes it does great things. In 2008, it launched the Tesla Roadster—the first-ever serial production lithium-ion battery car . Unlike previous electric cars , the Roadster was fast, sexy, and luxurious. Since its release, over 12 million electric cars have been sold worldwide, with Tesla contributing over 1 million to that number.

But what if Tesla never existed or never sparked the electric car revolution—would we have millions of electric cars on the road today? Of course, the electric car revolution would have happened eventually. But it was only two years before the Roadster’s release that the death of the electric car was being lamented in the infamous documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? If the big automakers really did kill the electric car, as the documentary suggests, then Tesla surely revived it.

That’s great news for Earth’s future inhabitants. Taking action to reduce the harms of climate change, by buying an electric car, for instance, is an urgent matter. Just last year, a study from Nature Communications estimated that "adding 4,434 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2020—equivalent to the lifetime emissions of 3.5 average Americans—causes one excess death globally in expectation between 2020-2100."

Enlarge / The new Porsche 963 sports prototype made its world debut at this year's Goodwood Festival of Speed in England. (credit: Porsche)

Last month, Porsche used the Goodwood Festival of Speed in the UK to formally debut its newest model. It's not another 911, nor a new SUV; it's a hybrid sports prototype designed to win on track here in the US and at Le Mans. You can tell the car has big shoes to fill just by looking at its name—Porsche is calling the new racing car the 963 because it's the spiritual successor to the legendary 962 that dominated sports car racing in the 1980s.

Unfortunately, Goodwood took place at the same time as my vacation at Watkins Glen in New York for IMSA's six-hour race, so Ars wasn't able to see the 963 run in person. But I was able to sit down with a pair of Porsche's factory racing drivers to find out a bit more about the new car.

Mathieu Jaminet and Matt Campbell are currently contesting the IMSA WeatherTech championship in a GT car—a Porsche 911 GT3R that started life on the same production line as the road-going 911s. But next year, the pair will be among the Porsche factory drivers who have been chosen to campaign the faster, more complex 963 here in the US or in the World Endurance Championship (WEC).

Enlarge / Glance's ad copy promises "authentic engagement" with its lock screen billboard. (credit: Glance)

Android smartphones can be a rough market, and to squeeze as much profit out of a phone as possible, carriers often sell every square inch of a phone to the highest bidder. Packed-in, often un-installable crapware apps fill your app drawer and advertise their services. The rules are a lot looser for packed-in apps compared to Play Store apps, so data-hungry companies like Facebook often pay for a spot where they can more easily harvest data.

According to a report from TechCrunch , one new startup is inventing a new, more invasive form of crapware: lock screen ads. The company, "Glance," is a subsidiary of Indian ad tech company InMobi, and TechCrunch reports the lock screen "content" company is "planning to launch its lock screen platform on Android smartphones in the US within two months."

Glance's app is a full-screen takeover of the lock screen. It looks a lot like a generic swipe-heavy social network, like TikTok or Snapchat Discover, but it only shows content from Glance. Imagine if every time you turned on your phone, you were first presented with an auto-playing video from a popular off-brand TikToker, and you get the idea. The company's website promises "unparalleled reach" and "authentic engagement" from its captive audience. Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO of InMobi, gave a rather dystopian description of his company's strategy to Forbes India, saying, "Consumers will move from seeking content to consuming what is shown to them."

Enlarge (credit: Meta )

Meta will shut down its pilot of the Novi digital wallet, one of the last remnants of the company's beleaguered cryptocurrency push, in September, Bloomberg reported this week.

Novi users in parts of the US and Guatemala will no longer be able to log in starting on September 1.

And as of July 21, they won't be able to add to the wallets. In fact, Novi's website urges users to empty their accounts "as soon as possible." Novi says it will "attempt to transfer your balance to the bank account or debit card you’ve added to Novi" if you still have money in your account after the pilot ends.

Enlarge / After building the R1T adventure truck, Rivian has followed up with the R1S SUV. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Rivian provided flights from DC to Albany and back, plus two nights in a hotel so we could drive the R1S. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

Last September, we drove one of Rivian's new electric trucks and found its R1 platform highly competent on and off the road, with an impressive level of engineering that made driving to the top of a mountain almost effortless . It's been a tough few months for the electric vehicle maker since then, with supply chain issues delaying deliveries , a former executive filing a discrimination lawsuit, and shareholders upset about a rather clumsy price hike .

But Rivian remains very well-funded, and its factory in Normal, Illinois, is finding its feet building electric trucks as well as delivery vans for Amazon . Now another R1-based EV is entering production—the R1S SUV.

Like its truck sibling, the R1S is a friendly-looking thing, particularly compared to the more aggressive SUVs coming out of Detroit. Partly that's down to the design of the lights, which should set off your pareidolia , and partly down to what now passes for a relatively low hood height, with curved edges finding favor over sharp creases at the corners.

Enlarge / Conceptual computer artwork of electronic circuitry with blue and red light passing through it, representing how data may be controlled and stored in a quantum computer. (credit: Getty Images)

In the not-too-distant future—as little as a decade, perhaps, nobody knows exactly how long—the cryptography protecting your bank transactions, chat messages, and medical records from prying eyes is going to break spectacularly with the advent of quantum computing. On Tuesday, a US government agency named four replacement encryption schemes to head off this cryptopocalypse.

Some of the most widely used public-key encryption systems—including those using the RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman algorithms—rely on mathematics to protect sensitive data. These mathematical problems include (1) factoring a key's large composite number (usually denoted as N) to derive its two factors (usually denoted as P and Q) and (2) computing the discrete logarithm that keys are based on.

The security of these cryptosystems depends entirely on classical computers' difficulty in solving these problems. While it's easy to generate keys that can encrypt and decrypt data at will, it's impossible from a practical standpoint for an adversary to calculate the numbers that make them work.