Age verification is consuming the Internet. From social media bans in Australia to porn restrictions in half of US states, for many having to prove their age to access websites is becoming an everyday requirement. But one of the key technologies underpinning many of these age checks is about to seep into the offline world—with potentially life-changing consequences for people having their age predicted by AI.

Starting next year, the British government is planning to introduce facial age estimation—where AI scans your face and suggests how old you are—to help determine the age of asylum seekers arriving at the United Kingdom’s border. The move is believed to be the first time that a so-called facial age estimation (FAE) system has been used in this way. Many asylum seekers arriving in the UK will not have documents proving their age, and if children are incorrectly classed as adults, they can be stripped of some legal protections and placed in adult-only detention centers.

An investigation by WIRED and Lighthouse Reports, in collaboration with The Independent, has obtained an internal UK government report detailing its tests of FAE technologies. It shows how the systems regularly mistake children for adults and appear to contain serious bias problems, which directly impact the largest group of migrants subject to age assessments in 2025, according to data from the Home Office. The investigation raises questions about the effectiveness of the technology and whether it should be deployed in such high-stakes scenarios.

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Welcome to Edition 8.46 of the Rocket Report! We don't mention Starship in the body of this week's report, so I'll give a brief update here. The next test flight of SpaceX's mega-rocket—Flight 13—could happen as soon as next month, according to Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview with CNBC. There's still a fair bit of work to do before Flight 13, so don't count on a launch next month just yet. What we do know, based on Shotwell's comments to CNBC, is the next Starship test flight will look a lot like the previous one last month, with a suborbital flight path and a splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is holding off on an orbital flight until at least the following launch, Flight 14, after the ship was unable to complete a critical engine restart in space on the last flight.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Isar test flight scrubbed again. Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company’s efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks, Ars reports. The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle’s fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause." Isar is flush with cash, having raised nearly $1 billion to date, but is still lacking in the critical currency of flight experience. The Spectrum rocket has flown just once to date, on a failed launch last year that lasted less than 30 seconds.

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MAJURO, Marshall Islands—Perched on the bow of an aluminum landing craft, Anne Cohen gazed a few yards ahead of the vessel toward a yellow robot gliding across the emerald Majuro lagoon.

The unmanned surface vehicle, called Yellowfin, was quickly becoming one of the coral researcher’s most dependable guides in these Central Pacific waters.

“She’s the best dive buddy,” said Cohen, a tenured scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod. Programmed to navigate to a precise set of coordinates, the robot cut through small swells like a tiny sailboat without a mast, directing Cohen toward a destination she had traveled thousands of miles to revisit.

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WALLOPS ISLAND, Va.—Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What's more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?

Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution. "They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, 'Yeah, let’s do it,'" said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.

That was in August of last year. In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift's orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.

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Microsoft says it has detected new self-propagating malware that spreads through USB drives in search of cryptocurrency credentials, which it then sends to attacker-controlled servers.

The company named the worm Crypto Clipper because it monitors the contents of device clipboards for patterns consistent with wallet addresses or seed phrases. When found, the malware also takes five screenshots over a 10-second period. Both the credentials and the screenshots are then sent to the attacker through Tor, a network protocol that provides anonymous routing by sending traffic through redundant nodes so logs can’t capture both the sending and receiving IP addresses. Crypto Clipper establishes the Tor connection by using a SOCKS5 proxy, a network protocol that sends traffic through a proxy server, which then forwards it to its final destination.

A lightweight backdoor

“The execution of this clipper is notable because it does not depend on a traditional installer or exposed IP-based C2 infrastructure,” Microsoft said Thursday. “Instead, it deploys a portable Tor client, routes traffic through a local SOCKS5 proxy, and blends data theft with remote code execution, turning a financially motivated stealer into a lightweight backdoor.”

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Independent advisors for the Food and Drug Administration on Friday voted 9–0 in support of approving Moderna's seasonal mRNA flu vaccine, which a Trump appointee at the agency initially tried to block from even being reviewed.

In an all-day meeting, members of the FDA's advisory committee—known as VRBPAC for Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee—pored over data and presentations on the vaccine, which is dubbed mRNA-1010 and branded as mFlusiva. The presentations included a review from FDA scientists, which was supportive of the vaccine.

Data from a Phase 3 trial including over 40,000 adults age 50 and older found the mRNA vaccine was around 27 percent more effective against seasonal flu than a standard flu shot. A smaller Phase 3 trial, involving data from nearly 3,000 people age 65 years and older, showed the shot produces stronger immune responses than a high-dose flu vaccine, which is recommended for this age group. The safety profile of the vaccine was also generally good.

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Taiwan’s existence as a self-governing democracy may depend heavily on having enough military drones to discourage any attempted invasion by China’s military. As the Taiwanese government aims to boost domestic production of military drones and Taiwanese citizens sign up for drone flight training, Taiwanese companies are forming international partnerships to sell more drones to the US military and other overseas buyers.

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense proposed a special budget that would spend $6.6 billion over six years on buying drones made in Taiwan, according to the Central News Agency that represents the national news service of Taiwan. Presented on June 18, the budget proposal would allow the government to buy more than 208,000 coastal attack drones, along with more than 1,400 coastal reconnaissance drones and 1,320 uncrewed surface vessels, between 2026 and 2031.

That would be a significant boost to the Taiwanese military arsenal that currently includes just 5,000 US-made attack drones and domestically produced drones, according to Resilience Media. During military exercises in early June, Taiwanese soldiers fired Altius-600 loitering munition drones—made by a subsidiary of the US military technology company Anduril Industries—from towed flatbed launchers to strike offshore targets, according to USNI News. In another exercise earlier this year, Taiwanese Marines used Taiwan-made drones to similarly strike targets at sea.

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Three months ago, during a flashy event at its Washington, DC, headquarters, NASA announced that it was shifting the focus of its lunar plans from an orbital space station to a Moon base on the surface.

As part of this, officials said work would be paused on the Lunar Gateway planned to orbit the Moon. Of the two elements that were furthest along, NASA also revealed that one of them—the  Power and Propulsion Element—would be repurposed to serve as a core module for a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration in deep space.

Less was said about the fate of the other major component, the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO). This is the large pressurized module, 6.1 meters long, in which visiting astronauts would spend the majority of their time when visiting the Lunar Gateway. NASA has awarded contracts worth $1.1 billion to Northrop Grumman to design, build, and integrate the habitation module with the Power and Propulsion Element.

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Almost 20 years ago, Google pitched Android as the more open alternative to Apple's walled garden. Last year, Google announced it would begin erecting its own walls through developer verification. The company has issued an update on its plans, affirming that the verification system will begin rolling out in select countries later this year. We're also learning which app stores are participating in verification and the timeline for key features like the recently revealed "advanced flow" for bypassing verification.

Google has claimed that developer verification is a necessary change to smartphone software distribution, pointing to the increased prevalence of scams that trick Android users into installing malware apps. Google's solution requires verifying the identities of developers outside the Play Store just like it does for devs publishing on its platform. This has proven to be a contentious change for myriad reasons.

In the new blog post, Google's Matthew Forsythe confirms that the developer verification system is slated to come online on September 30 of this year. The initial deployment will be limited to countries with a high level of app scams: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand.

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Apple has updated its Beats Studio Buds wireless earbuds to patch a high-severity vulnerability that could be exploited by nearby hackers to eavesdrop on users.

The vulnerability, CVE-2025-20701, allowed improper authentication in the firmware running on the Bluetooth-related chips, enabling people within signal range to impersonate devices that had previously been paired with the earbuds. The researchers demonstrated this in a series of end-to-end attacks that allowed them to eavesdrop on conversations or sounds within earshot of the phone microphone.

Apple joins the patch party

“Impact: An attacker within Bluetooth range may be able to listen through the microphone of a device which is not yet paired and actively seeking pair requests,” Apple said in a Tuesday security advisory. The fix is contained in Beats Firmware Update 1B211, which is delivered automatically while headphones are paired with and within Bluetooth range of a user’s iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Users can check their firmware version by going to Settings on their device, navigating to Bluetooth, and tapping the info button next to the headphones.

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In May, the federal government announced without warning that it would take apart a network of ocean monitoring systems that it had spent over $350 million to build. No reason was given for the decision to shut down the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), but suspicion immediately focused on the network's role in tracking climate change.

But the OOI also provides data that's useful for weather forecasting and fisheries management, leading to widespread opposition. Today, it appears that the opposition has won, as the government will announce that it's reversing the decision. The big remaining question is how much damage the OOI took during the intervening month.

As of now, there is no formal statement available from the federal government. However, The New York Times reports that the decision will be announced later today, and Ars received a statement from Zoe Lofgren, the ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee, indicating that the decision has been made.

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A businessman with ties to Chinese military contractors was among the overseas investors who acquired stakes in SpaceX while it was still a private company. An entity linked to the Qatari royal family also took a stake.

The new details come from a private investor list obtained by ProPublica that sheds light on a particularly delicate issue for Elon Musk’s rocket company: which people in countries like China bought into the company, and how. SpaceX built its business off sensitive US government work like making spy satellites for the Pentagon. While there is no ban on Chinese investment in US military contractors, such investment is heavily regulated.

In a sign of its sensitivity to the concerns, SpaceX barred investors from China and Hong Kong from buying shares in its initial public offering last week due to “regulatory and compliance risks,” Bloomberg reported. The US government alleges that China has a strategy of using investments in sensitive industries for espionage and to get access to cutting-edge technology.

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Bernie Sanders has unveiled an aggressive plan to transfer trillions from leading AI firms to the public, and, to the likely horror of AI firms, it goes even further than expected to give Americans more control over the AI industry.

Sanders shared a summary of his legislation with AP News. If passed, the law would create a sovereign wealth fund “financed through a one-time 50 percent tax on the stock of the largest AI companies,” AP News reported. Any AI firm that does $200 million in annual AI sales would be subject to the tax, as would any new firm once it reaches that revenue level.

In total, Sanders estimated the fund could be worth $7 trillion, generating “hundreds of billions of dollars annually in direct payments to Americans and programs such as health care, education and housing,” AP News reported. Each American would likely receive more than $1,000 annually in 5 percent annual dividends, Sanders estimated.

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Plague swept through groups of hunter-gatherers in southeastern Siberia 5,500 years ago, leaving dozens dead in its wake—with DNA from Yersinia pestis bacteria still trapped inside their teeth.

University of Oxford ancient DNA researcher Ruairidh Macleod and his colleagues recently sequenced the telltale bacterial DNA in teeth from plague victims at four ancient cemeteries in the area around Russia’s Lake Baikal. The tragedy that befell these communities is now the earliest known plague outbreak, courtesy of the oldest strain of Y. pestis ever sequenced.

Unearthing a new backstory for the plague

Until recently, scientists who study the evolution of diseases have held two fairly solid ideas about the origins of plague, the disease caused by Yersinia pestis bacteria. It's a scourge so awful that it has gone down in history as not just a plague but the plague. The first idea is that the earliest strains didn't have the right genetic traits to be really lethal. And the second is that the plague first began menacing humans when the first farmers settled in densely packed towns alongside rats and domestic animals.

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Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev, who served twice as a crew member aboard the International Space Station (ISS), including during the final US space shuttle mission in 2011, has died at the age of 56.

With Samokutyaev's death on Wednesday, he becomes the first former ISS long-duration resident to die in the 26 years that the space station has been a home to 155 other cosmonauts and astronauts as expedition crew members. The cause of his death is unknown.

Portrait of cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev. Credit: Roscosmos

"The leadership and staff of the Roscosmos State Corporation extend their sincere condolences to the family and loved ones of Aleksandr Mikhailovich," officials with Russia's space agency said in a statement.

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We're about six weeks out from the debut of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the follow-up to 2021’s No Way Home. It's been five years since Spidey graced the big screen, so naturally, Sony Pictures has released a new trailer to build audience anticipation.

(Spoilers for No Way Home below.)

No Way Home ended on a pretty bleak note, with Peter Parker (Tom Holland) asking Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to erase him from everyone’s memory to protect the multiverse, including MJ (Zendaya).

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The Food and Drug Administration this week cleared a second carcass-feasting fly species for use in maggot wound therapy, according to an announcement from Cuprina Holdings, a Singapore-based company that has dubbed its new therapeutic larvae MediFly Maggots.

With the clearance, Cuprina appears to be the only company to have FDA clearance to sell two species of fly larvae—and it's abuzz with the potential to dominate the global maggot market.

The new species is Lucilia cuprina, or Australian sheep blowfly. It's a close relative of Lucilia sericata, or the common green bottle fly, which is the fly species most often used for wound therapy, often called biosurgery or maggot debridement therapy (MDT). L. sericata is the only other fly with FDA clearance, which the agency first granted in 2004 to Ronald Sherman, who is now Cuprina’s Medical and Scientific Director.

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Quantum computing news usually picks up near the end of the year, as companies try to provide evidence that they are hitting benchmarks on time. However, there have been interesting announcements as the summer starts this year, from incremental progress to attention-grabbing promises. As we did earlier this month, Ars has a rundown of some of the most significant announcements.

These include a promise of useful, error-corrected quantum computing as soon as 2028, details on an updated trapped ion processor, and a case in which claims of quantum supremacy have been cut back a bit thanks to advances in more traditional algorithms.

2028 is remarkably soon

Many people in the field expect that useful quantum computers are still about five to 10 years away. While there may be a few useful algorithms that can be run on existing error-prone hardware, almost all of the interesting problems that quantum computing can be applied to will require some form of error correction enabled by linking a small collection of hardware qubits together into what's called a logical qubit. Logical qubits include the redundant storage of information along with neighboring qubits that can be measured to determine when errors occur and how to fix them.

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California state regulators say AT&T lied to the Federal Communications Commission in an attempt to shut off its old copper phone network without providing an adequate replacement.

"AT&T asserts that California seeks to prohibit or hinder wireline carriers from discontinuing copper facilities and investing in fiber," said a June 15 filing by the state of California and the California Public Utilities Commission. "Indeed, AT&T has been making this argument for years. It is not and has never been true."

As we reported last month, AT&T sued California over the state’s refusal to let it stop providing phone service to all potential customers in its wireline network territory. AT&T also petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to declare that California cannot enforce its rules and to let AT&T stop providing service to about 199,000 phone customers.

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Researchers have uncovered a massive breach of Fortinet firewalls that has given Russian-speaking attackers near-unrestricted access to some of the world’s largest and most powerful organizations, including Oracle, Chevron, Lenovo, Federal Express, a NATO defense contractor, and Fortinet itself.

Nearly 74,000 Fortinet devices from more than 21,000 IP addresses in 194 countries have been compromised and their plaintext credentials exposed online, Bob Diachenko, a security researcher and head of SecurityDiscovery.com, said online and in an interview. He said he found the data after gaining access to the attackers’ command-and-control server and other infrastructure. The exposed data also included the industry, revenue, and employee count for each compromised organization.

Exceptional scale, poor opsec

Independent researcher Kevin Beaumont reported that “almost all” of the compromised devices remained online as of Wednesday morning. He went on to say that he has confirmed with multiple organizations found in the attackers’ logs that the credentials are real and current. In many cases, once the threat actors compromised the devices, they went on to access affected organizations’ centralized authentication systems, such as Radius servers and Microsoft Active Directory. The number of compromised devices comprises roughly half of all Internet-facing Fortinet firewalls, based on polling from Shodan.

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Tesco, a retail conglomerate headquartered in the United Kingdom, is moving 40,000 server workloads off of VMware amid "abusive conduct" from Broadcom, recent legal filings claim.

Tesco filed a lawsuit in the UK’s High Court against Broadcom alleging breach of contract last year. According to a September report from The Register, the lawsuit claimed that in January 2021, Tesco bought perpetual licenses for VMware’s vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation, a subscription to VMware Tanzu, plus support services until 2026, with the option to extend support for four additional years.

But when Broadcom took over VMware in November 2023, it would not honor the deal and instead tried to get Tesco to pay “excessive and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already paid” and would not allow it to buy support services for its perpetually licensed software without buying “duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products," the initial complaint read, The Register reported at the time.

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What happens when you give AI coding agents a lab full of robotic arms, some compute resources, and a “generous token budget” for teaching the robots various tasks? The agents can apparently figure out a training regimen that teaches the robots to successfully cut zip ties and even insert GPUs into thin sockets on motherboards.

That glimpse into how AI can act in a fully autonomous way to automate robot training was made possible by a new agent harness framework—software that wraps around AI models to enable their use of various tools while also providing capabilities such as memory, context, constraint, and feedback loops. That agentic harness, called ENPIRE, was developed by robotics researchers at the Nvidia GEAR (Generalist Embodied Agent Research) lab alongside collaborators from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the University of California, Berkeley.

“A part of our NVIDIA GEAR lab now self-improves tirelessly overnight,” wrote Jim Fan, director of AI at NVIDIA, in a LinkedIn post. “We just read the reports in the morning.”

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One of the most hotly anticipated electric vehicles makes its formal debut next week. It's the Blank Slate, a refreshingly simple pickup truck EV designed by Slate Auto, which is trying to take some of the soaring cost out of a new car with a back-to-basics approach that means even electric windows are an optional extra. Of course, a crucial aspect of this pared-back approach is pricing.

Plenty of people are attracted to the idea of a truck with a compact footprint, no infotainment system or embedded modem, and the option to upconvert it later into an SUV or fastback. In the abstract, at least, people aren't going to jump at the prospect of a truck with 150 miles (241 km) of range if it costs too much.

When Slate broke cover in 2025, it was targeting a price of around $20,000, assuming the $7,500 IRS clean vehicle tax credit would remain in effect, but it was abolished later that year.

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Late last week, Anthropic took its new Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models offline following a United States government export-control directive barring “any foreign national” from using the services. The company has been in talks with the White House since Friday but has yet to secure an agreement that would allow it to reinstate the offerings.

Since Mythos debuted in April, Anthropic has claimed—and warned—that the model has advanced capabilities for not only finding software vulnerabilities to help defenders patch them, but also figuring out ways to exploit them that could be used by bad actors. Anthropic itself noted this double-edged sword in its launch of Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. “A great deal of advanced usage of AI models is dual use: the same queries that are beneficial in the hands of cybersecurity professionals and biology researchers could be dangerous if available to malicious actors,” the company wrote in a blog post last week.

With this in mind, the company initially released a version called Mythos Preview to a select consortium as part of a working group known as Project Glasswing. Mythos 5 was also privately released to this group last week, while Claude Fable 5, which is a Mythos-grade model, was released to the general public with specific blocks on its ability to give responses to questions about biology and cybersecurity.

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Good things take time, but not all things that take time are good. The jury is still out on the Google Home Speaker, but it certainly took a while to arrive. After announcing its new speaker last August, Google finally has a release date. The company's first new smart home speaker in years will launch on June 25, and you can preorder it today for $100.

The generically named Google Home Speaker is Google's first home audio device in almost six years. The last one was the Nest Audio, which debuted back in September 2020. The new device is small and round—an oblate spheroid, technically. It's covered in a partially recycled fabric available in four colors: hazel, porcelain, jade, and berry (jade and berry are limited to the US). Google says the device produces "360-degree sound" for a uniform listening experience anywhere in a room.

Google is into lighting effects again. Credit: Google

Previous Google speakers included Assistant-style illuminated lights, but the Google Home Speaker features a light ring around the bottom that glows when the device is listening, "thinking," or responding. This is becoming a trend with Google. The company will require a similar glowing lightbar embellishment on the upcoming Googlebook laptops. There are three far-field microphones distributed around the speaker that will pick up your speech, and there's a mute switch when you don't want it listening for the "OK Google" trigger.

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One of the United States' most storied space launch sites has been cleared of its decades-old support towers, making way for modern rockets to use the pad. Space Launch Complex-6 (SLC-6) at Vandenberg Space Force Station is arguably better known for what did not lift off from there than for what did.

A series of demolition charges on Tuesday (June 16) brought down the access tower, mobile service tower, and what remained of the assembly building at SLC-6—pronounced "slick-six"—in Southern California. Once the location for the US Air Force's first effort to put humans into space and later, the West Coast launch site for the space shuttle, SLC-6 will next be used by SpaceX in support of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy missions.

Vandenberg Space Force Base personnel watch as the assembly building at Space Launch Complex-6 (SLC-6) is toppled on June 16, 2026, to make way for SpaceX's use of the site. Credit: Space Launch Delta 30/Tech. Sgt. Draeke Layman

"Space Launch Complex-6 represents six decades of American innovation and our unwavering commitment to securing space superiority," Col. James T. Horne III, commander of Space Launch Delta 30 at Vandenberg, said in a statement. "By modernizing this historic footprint in partnership with our defense industrial base, we are building directly upon the foundation of our pioneers."

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A gene therapy for Huntington's disease has a new path toward approval from the Food and Drug Administration after the ouster of several Trump officials, particularly Vinay Prasad, who rejected the therapy in a shocking move one former FDA official called "truly evil."

Huntington's disease is an inherited condition that typically strikes in middle age and causes nerve cells in the brain to gradually break down. There are currently no treatments for the disease, and many afflicted die in their 50s and 60s.

Gene therapy company UniQure developed a one-time treatment, AMT-130, that aims to lower brain levels of the mutant protein behind the disease, called huntingtin. Data from a small, early trial suggested the drug could slow the progression of the disease up to 75 percent, and patients and advocates have closely watched the drug's development in hopeful anticipation.

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Has the allure of the Porsche Taycan waned? The four-door electric sedan that thinks it's a GT sold well for the first few years after its introduction in 2020, but sales began to slip even before the brand added the smaller, more affordable Macan SUV to its electric lineup. The EV underwent its midlife refresh a couple of years ago, but it seems Stuttgart wasn't done yet; Porsche has some more tweaks for model year 2027, at least for the US market.

For one thing, the 105 kWh performance battery is standard across the Taycan range now—which starts at $111,900—and can charge at up to 320 kW with an 800 V DC fast charger.

And as long as you're not ordering the stripped-out Turbo GT with the Weissach Pack, there's a new plug for that—the CCS1 port that usually lives on the passenger side has been replaced by a NACS port. So no adapter is needed to charge at any of those thousands of Tesla superchargers, but only a small percentage of them operate at sufficient voltage to charge near the Taycan's limit. But IONNA has native NACS chargers capable of 400 kW, and Porsche will provide a CCS1 adapter to use with Electrify America and other 800 V chargers.

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The clock is ticking for Windows and Linux users to update cryptographic keys that protect their systems against firmware-based UEFI infections, a pernicious form of malware that loads before operating system and anti-malware protections start.

Beginning June 24, three certificates that cryptographically verify that each piece of firmware and software that loads during system boot will expire. The Microsoft-signed certificates are the linchpins of Secure Boot, a Microsoft-designed chain of trust. Secure Boot checks the digital signatures of all firmware that loads during system startup to ensure it originates from a trusted provider, such as the manufacturer of the motherboard the system runs on.

Secure Boot is designed to thwart UEFI bootkits, a form of malware that alters the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, the successor to the BIOS, both of which begin the initial boot sequence. Because these bootkits load before the OS and most other code, they can be difficult to detect. Once installed, they typically load malware onto the OS that steals credentials, backdoors the system, or performs other malicious actions. Even when the OS is disinfected, the bootkit can reinfect the system. Bootkits survive OS reinstallations as well.

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The Trump administration is trying to help Elon Musk's xAI Corp. beat a Clean Air Act lawsuit filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The US said the NAACP lawsuit threatens an xAI data center that powers Grok systems needed by the military.

The NAACP sued xAI and subsidiary MZX Tech in April, alleging that they violated the Clean Air Act by operating 27 gas turbines without an air permit in Southaven, Mississippi. The number of unpermitted turbines rose to 57 by mid-May and there were plans to install two more, the NAACP said in a June 12 filing.

"Defendants’ Colossus Gas Plant powers xAI’s nearby Colossus 2 data center, which in turn powers the chatbot 'Grok,'" the lawsuit said. The gas turbines have fueled both health concerns and noise complaints.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) new virtualization software promotion will likely pique the interest of end users and resellers who are unhappy with Broadcom's pricing of VMware.

During its HPE Discover event in Las Vegas this week, HPE announced that customers could use its “HPE Morpheus Software—VM Essentials” offering for free for “up to one year,” per a press release. HPE’s website describes its virtualization platform as a “VMware alternative.” It includes a hardware virtual machine (HVM) hypervisor and unified management and lets users "manage VMware ESXi and HVM clusters from one console and migrate when you’re ready,” HPE’s website says.

“New VM Essentials customers can receive up to one free year of licenses for VM Essentials, a year of HPE Zerto for $1 to support non-disruptive migration to HPE virtual machines, and 0 percent interest on software through HPE Financial Services,” HPE’s announcement reads, referring to HPE’s group for helping IT teams manage funding.

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Last week, we looked at a new study of the origin of complex cells, one that showed that our ancestors' genomes were pieced together from bits and pieces of multiple species. It put a spotlight on a phenomenon called horizontal gene transfer, in which a gene from one species is incorporated into the genome of a distantly related species. The frequency of horizontal gene transfer means that, in addition to the neatly branching trees that relate species by common descent, there are small threads connecting distant branches of the tree of life.

It's easy to see why horizontal gene transfer would be common among microbes. They often live in complex communities that are likely awash in the DNA of dead and damaged cells. Plus, bacteria and archaea lack a membrane between their DNA and the rest of the cell, making it easier for environmental DNA to find its way to the genome.

However, a new study this week shows that horizontal gene transfers are remarkably common even in multicellular animals. And it does so by examining the genomes of multiple cockroach species, which have had bits of bacterial DNA for millions of years.

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Amazon now has hundreds of flight-ready satellites standing idle in Florida, waiting to join the company's low-Earth orbit Internet constellation, an Amazon official said Tuesday.

"They're built, and sitting in a payload processing facility waiting for trips to orbit," said Steve Metayer, vice president of Amazon Leo Production Operations, during a teleconference with reporters. "And we're currently manufacturing several satellites a day."

Metayer spoke on the eve of the company's next mission, during which an Ariane 64 rocket will launch three dozen Amazon Leo satellites into orbit from a spaceport in French Guiana. Liftoff is targeted for 7:53 am ET (11:53 UTC) on Wednesday.

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Last month, Anthropic announced a billing change that would have substantially increased costs for heavy users of its automation-focused Claude Agent SDK, including many third-party apps. On Monday, though, Anthropic abruptly announced it had paused those pricing changes just as they were set to take effect, allowing Agent SDK users to continue drawing from the more generous usage limits in their existing Claude subscriptions.

The plan, as announced on May 13, would have treated usage of the Claude Agent SDK (including via third-party apps and the programmatic "claude -p" command) separately from "standard" Claude usage via the chat interface or the official Claude CLI. At the time, Anthropic said that, as of June 15, that kind of outside SDK usage would be billed at Anthropic's prevailing API rates, with subscribers receiving a simple monthly usage credit equal to their subscription price.

That would have been a major change from the current setup, where Agent SDK use is limited only by the standard weekly caps applied to a user's current Claude subscription tier. Those generous limits allow power users to squeeze a lot more usage out of those paid subscriptions than they would get by paying the same price for API fees. One analysis suggests that Claude Opus users start saving money from their subscription after just two to three messages per day, and that their subscription could be worth many multiples of its monthly cost in API usage.

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When the US Department of Justice approved Paramount Skydance's proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on Friday, a DOJ press release said "a rigorous eight-month investigation led by the [Antitrust] Division’s career staff" showed that the $111 billion deal would not harm competition or American consumers.

But according to The Wall Street Journal, the DOJ career lawyers who led that investigation "were leaning toward recommending a lawsuit challenging it on the grounds that the combination of the two movie studios would be anticompetitive and violate antitrust law." DOJ senior leaders closed the investigation "before career staffers who were concerned about the acquisition had an opportunity to object, according to people familiar with the matter," the WSJ reported.

Commenting on the report that the decision to allow the deal surprised staff investigators, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote that "the American people need to know if this merger was approved as a political favor. This reeks of corruption."

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The US Department of Defense has a lot of congressionally mandated homework to do every year involving hundreds of required reports on various national security topics. But Pentagon officials have been proudly describing a new shortcut—using generative AI tools to write such reports for Congress.

Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael highlighted AI-generated reports to Congress as a key example of how the Department of Defense—stylized as the Department of War under the Trump administration—has adopted generative AI during an event hosted by the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, DC, on June 12. The Pentagon has made AI tools, starting with Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government, widely available to members of all six military branches through the department’s bespoke GenAI.mil platform since December 2025.

“I have to report to Congress every year on this thing,” Michael said. “Let me load all the papers onto it and have it draft me a congressional report that would otherwise take 200 hours of staffing time and do it in five hours.”

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Android 17 has been in testing since early this year, with the final beta hitting devices just a couple of weeks ago. Insofar as a mature operating system like Android still has big days, this is one of them. The official Android 17 build is starting its rollout on Pixel phones, adding a small set of new features and laying the groundwork for the future. This release also coincides with a Pixel Drop and a new version of Wear OS (based on Android 17) on Pixel Watches.

Google no longer uses an unmodified version of Android on its phones—the Pixel build includes numerous features that are distinct from Android 17 itself. Other device makers will include versions of some of these features when they eventually update their phones, but for now, Google's Pixel phones are the only way to experience Android 17.

The multitasking Bubbles system in Android 17 expands on a similar (but underutilized) messaging feature. In Android 17 on Pixels, you can long-press on any app icon to open that app as a floating window. When minimized, these bubbles stay on top of other apps. On foldable phones, the bubbles dock into a "bubble bar" for easy multitasking.

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The Trump administration has abandoned its effort to halt wind energy projects across the United States and dropped its challenge to the court ruling that tossed President Donald Trump’s order freezing federal permitting and leasing for wind projects. States that challenged the order hailed the development as one of the most significant legal victories against the Trump White House’s campaign against the energy transition.

On Monday, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit dismissed the appeal after the Justice Department filed a motion for its voluntary dismissal on June 10.

The case against Trump’s executive order was filed in May 2025 by a coalition of attorneys general from 17 states and Washington, DC, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

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SpaceX will acquire AI coding tool Cursor for $60 billion in an all-stock transaction, the companies announced today. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.

It comes just two days after SpaceX's unprecedented IPO and a few months after the merger of SpaceX and xAI, which brought a significant restructuring of xAI.

Cursor was one of the first tools to fully bake features that leverage large language models into an IDE. It's a branch of Visual Studio Code with heavy AI integration. However, incumbent platforms and bigger AI companies have since rolled out comparable features.

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As OpenAI files SEC paperwork ahead of an expected initial public stock offering, newly leaked financial documents show a company with quickly growing revenues that are currently being overwhelmed by even larger expenses.

The audited financial statements, obtained by independent journalist Ed Zitron, show OpenAI's reported revenue growing from $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13.07 billion in 2025. The Financial Times, which reviewed the same documents, writes that the company's monthly revenues had grown to nearly $2 billion by the end of 2025, suggesting that its ongoing revenue rates continued to grow throughout the year.

R&D expenses alone still easily outpace OpenAI's quickly growing revenues. Credit: Ars Technica

But the company's fast-growing revenues are still dwarfed by its even more significant expenses. OpenAI's total revenues in both of the last two years were outpaced by research and development alone, which grew from a $7.81 billion line item in 2024 to a massive $19.18 billion cost in 2025. Those numbers seem to reflect the significant costs OpenAI incurred in training new models and include $10.59 billion in R&D costs paid to Microsoft alone in 2025.

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The driving technology company Mobileye plans to launch a robotaxi service in an as-yet-unnamed US city in 2027, it said earlier today. The service will be vertically integrated, using Mobileye's Moovit mobility platform to interact with customers booking rides, coordinate drivers, and so on. The Israeli company, which was bought by Intel in 2017 before going public again in 2022, says it will start with around 100 robotaxis early next year.

"Mobileye has spent more than two decades building the technologies required for autonomous driving," said Amnon Shashua, founder and CEO of Mobileye. "Today we are taking the next step: combining those technologies with operational ownership to create a financially and geographically scalable robotaxi business designed from the ground up for global deployment."

The company first rose to prominence in the mid-2010s, when Tesla began using Mobileye's advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) as part of Autopilot. That relationship lasted until 2016, when Mobileye dropped Tesla as a customer after being alarmed that a driver assistance system was being sold to end users as driverless technology. Since then, Mobileye has continued to work with other partners on ADAS and autonomous vehicles.

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Greetings, Arsians, and welcome to the great Ars Technica 2026 reader survey! It has been almost four years since we last ran a big site-wide survey like this, where we ask our readers—you!—what you like about the work we do and what we could perhaps improve on. This kind of check-in is absolutely vital to ensuring we're steering the ship properly, and we take the results very seriously. (The last time we did this, we got several thousand responses, and that's incredibly valuable data for us!)

You don't have to have been a reader since 1998 to weigh in, either. Whether you're a first-time reader, an old grizzled forum veteran, a front page comment maven, a newbie sysadmin, or a CEO, we want to hear what you have to say, no matter who you are. The only requirement is that you're a human! (Aliens are welcome as well, though we didn't really define any demographic categories for extraterrestrial beings. We'll tackle this issue if it comes up, I suppose.) There are a few text fields. Yes, we will read what you write there!

To assay, perchance to sing

Fortunately, this isn't a long survey—just a handful of targeted questions. We're not collecting any personally identifying information, and responses will only be viewed in aggregate. None of the data will be analyzed by anyone except us, and none of it will be sold or otherwise distributed outside of Ars. (We're using SurveyMonkey for our survey platform, the same as we have many times in the past.)

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Last Tuesday, Microsoft patched a vulnerability it rated as max critical in its M365 Copilot AI platform. On Monday, the researchers who discovered the vulnerability and reported it to Microsoft revealed how their proof-of-concept exploit could retrieve 2FA codes and other sensitive data from emails accessible to Copilot.

Microsoft and other LLM providers have been unable to prevent their products from complying with malicious requests to reveal data. The root cause: AI bots are unable to distinguish between instructions provided by users and those snuck into third-party content the models are summarizing, drafting responses to, or using to perform other actions on behalf of the user. With no way to secure this crucial boundary, Microsoft and its peers are left to erect complicated and ad hoc guardrails designed to rein in the consequences of this incurable gullibility.

Jumping over guardrails

One guardrail built into Copilot and most other LLMs prevents them from submitting web forms, sending emails, and taking similar actions that can be used to exfiltrate data from the user. To work around this, LLM hackers turned to markup language, which, among other things, allows users to add formatting elements such as headings, lists, and links to text without the need for HTML tags. Another workaround is to wrap sensitive data inside HTML tags such as <img> and <form>. In either case, a web request showing the data hits the attacker’s web server, where the secret information is captured in logs.

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The next gadget to bear the storied Commodore branding will be a flip phone.

The name behind the bestselling desktop PC in history came back about a year ago. Christian “Peri Fractic” Simpson, best known for running the Retro Recipes (now known as Retro Recipes x Commodore) YouTube channel, acquired the Commodore Corporation and "100 percent of the original and official trademarks that defined the Commodore name since 1983,” per a July 2025 press release. Simpson said the price was “in the low seven figures.” Since the acquisition, the brand released the Commodore 64 Ultimate and the Commodore 64X PC, a mini PC housed in a chassis that resembles the Commodore 64.

Today, the new Commodore announced a new device in a dated design: a flip phone.

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Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company's efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks.

The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle's fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause."

The two-stage, 92-foot-tall (28-meter) Spectrum rocket was awaiting liftoff from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway. It was the fourth time in five months that Isar Aerospace, headquartered near Munich, Germany, had reached a target launch date for the second test flight of the Spectrum launch vehicle.

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Although most Americans have eschewed seasonal COVID-19 vaccines, the updated shots continue to show significant protection against cardiovascular disease, especially for those over age 75 and those with underlying medical conditions. That's according to a new study that pulled data from more than 1 million patients in a US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health system.

The finding builds on previous data showing that the vaccines significantly lower the risk of COVID-19-associated cardiovascular risks, particularly heart attacks and strokes. But it wasn't a given that the benefit would hold up over time—as the virus evolved, the vaccines were updated, population-level immunity increased from previous infection and vaccination, and risk of severe outcomes fell.

The new study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that the 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine continued to protect against COVID-19-associated "major adverse cardiovascular events" (MACE), which include cardiovascular death, heart attack, stroke, and hospitalization for heart failure.

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The UK government announced today that it will ban social media for all kids under the age of 16 in rules expected to take effect in spring 2027. The ban will apply to platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X.

"We’re going further than any country in the world by banning social media for under-16s and putting wider protections in place to give kids their childhood back," Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in the announcement.

In addition to the ban on social media, Starmer's government said it will impose "world-leading blocks on harmful functions such as livestreaming and stranger communication with children for under-16s... Restrictions on these functionalities will also be on by default for 16- and 17-year-olds to prevent a cliff-edge at 16." The livestreaming and stranger-contact rules would apply to a range of services, such as online gaming.

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Chipmaker Nvidia is planning to sell $25 billion of investment-grade debt in the US on Monday, its first bond sale in five years, in a test of investor appetite for further exposure to the AI sector.

In a marquee seven-part bond offering, the company will issue a wide range of maturities from two years to 30 years, according to a term sheet seen by the FT.

The issuance was upsized from $20 billion after receiving more than $85 billion in orders by early afternoon in New York, according to people familiar with the deal.

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The upper stage from a commercial Chinese rocket that launched last week has broken apart in space, spreading debris in a heavily trafficked part of low-Earth orbit home to the International Space Station and a significant portion of SpaceX's Starlink broadband network.

The breakup occurred shortly after the Zhuque-2E rocket reached orbit on June 9 with two satellites providing direct-to-cell communications, perhaps around the time the upper stage was expected to perform a disposal burn. The US Space Force confirmed the breakup event in a post on space-track.org, a website used by the military to distribute orbit data to the public.

"The tracked pieces are being incorporated into routine conjunction assessment to support spaceflight safety," the Space Force wrote in an advisory. "There are currently no threats to human spaceflight. Analysis is ongoing."

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Fox Corporation has agreed to buy Roku Inc. for $160 per share, an approximate enterprise value of $22 billion, the firms announced today.

The acquisition would unite Fox’s broadcast channels, including Fox, Fox News, Fox Business, and FS1, as well as its streaming businesses, including Tubi, a free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) platform that Fox bought in 2020, with Roku’s own FAST service, The Roku Channel, and Roku’s streaming hardware business, including its streaming sticks and smart TVs. Roku says it has 100 million households using its platform.

The most valuable part of Roku’s business isn't its hardware, which lost $19.1 million in the quarter ending March 31, 2026, but its the operating system (Roku OS) and advertising business. In that same quarter, Roku’s advertising and subscriptions business posted a gross profit of $584.1 million, with the advertising business pulling in $371 million in revenue. The COVID-19 pandemic helped Roku become profitable in 2021, but the company didn’t see annual profitability again until 2025.

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