Chinese retailer AliExpress has been caught fingerprinting visitors after one of the metrics—an outdated technique that measures inaudible sounds it sends to browsers—impeded a researcher's ability to use his bluetooth headphones.

Researcher Matthew Callaghan said he stumbled on the stealthy tracking by mistake. After loading the AliExpress homepage, audio from his phone stopped playing over his multipoint headphones, which accept connections from more than one device at a time. He set the headphones to play sounds from his phone except when his PC was producing audio. Each time he loaded AliExpress, the phone audio stopped. Each time he closed the tab the site was loaded into, the phone was once again audible.

Users can't hear it, but browsers can

While investigating the odd behavior, Callaghan said he found two highly obfuscated scripts. Together, they rendered a graph that analyzed the WebAudio readings of each visiting browser. This graph acted as an oscillator that measured Sawtooth waves, which are common in output from digital audio.

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Welcome to Edition 9.07 of the Rocket Report! China's workhorse Long March rocket family appears to be rebounding quickly from a rare launch failure August 10. Chinese officials have not publicly released any information on what may have caused the Long March 7A rocket to break apart less than 90 seconds after liftoff, but the rocket's use of YF-100 engines initially raised questions about the failure's impact on other Chinese rockets that use the same type of engines. But no biggie. YF-100 engines returned to flight six days later with the successful flight of a Long March 12 rocket, and the heavy-lift Long March 5—also with YF-100 engines—is set to launch in a few days with one of China's most important space missions of the decade: the Chang'e 7 lunar lander en route to the Moon's south pole.

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.

Trouble in Taiwan. A prototype for a future satellite launch vehicle developed by Taiwan's top weapons manufacturer veered off course shortly after liftoff Wednesday, Taiwan's Central News Agency reports. The "trajectory anomaly" prompted the activation of the rocket's self-destruct mechanism. The government agency responsible for the test flight, the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST), reported no injuries or property damage. Debris from the rocket fell into a planned safety control zone near the southern tip of Taiwan.

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Despite making changes last fall to help block adults from messaging unknown children, Roblox is still failing to stop adults from creeping on kids in other ways, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, said on Thursday.

Suspecting that Roblox may not be doing enough to stop child exploitation, eSafety conducted testing earlier this year that flagged alarming gaps in Roblox safeguards. The agency found that adult strangers could still send connection requests to kids, whose “profiles and biographies, including account names, number and names of connections, avatar images, and non-sensitive biographical information such as their interests were visible to anyone on the Roblox platform, with no option to restrict the visibility of this information.”

Such requests did not trigger parental alerts, eSafety found, and bad actors could also search kids’ visible-to-anyone contact lists for more targets.

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Elon Musk’s talk about maintaining a million-strong AI data center satellite megaconstellation may not exactly be practical or economical, but it might be unique. It’s about the closest we’ve come to confronting a scheme that would export a considerable amount of valuable materials into space. Humans aren’t doing a great job of material sustainability, but normally we’re talking about stuff escaping a recycling pipeline rather than escaping Earth’s gravitational pull.

The commercial space sector likes talking about the allure of mining asteroids for precious metals to bring back to Earth. Under what circumstances are we going to be willing to do that in reverse? Starlink alone has doubled the mass of objects in low-Earth orbit, and this orbital data center constellation would dwarf that—and dispose of at least some satellites by pushing them away from Earth.

Given the roughly five-year expected lifetime for data center GPUs, about 200,000 of the 1 million proposed SpaceX AI1 satellites would be decommissioned each year. Based on their May 29 FCC filing, about 40,000 would definitely deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere. (Those materials would largely be dispersed throughout the atmosphere, turning a resource into a diffuse contaminant that slowly settles over the globe. One related issue: the aluminum would cause an unknown amount of ozone depletion over a period of decades.) Some or all of the remaining 160,000 satellites would be moved outward into a distant “disposal” orbit, instead. Either way, they're lost from a "material life cycle" point of view.

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Meta platforms recently ran ads for an AI porn-generation tool that seemingly encouraged users to create deepfaked videos resembling female US politicians, despite the company’s policies against ads containing sexual material. It’s the latest in a series of failures by Meta to keep advertisements for tools that produce nonconsensual intimate imagery off its platforms.

The tool, which is called Kromix, bills itself as an “AI image styler.” A voice-over for one of the video advertisements, viewed by WIRED, promotes the tool as having “no restrictions,” saying “all the characters are real people” and describing it as “the AI that men actually use.” In one ad, a woman closely resembling a prominent female US politician is seen in front of a US flag and the flag of the president of the US above the caption “What if she moved?” She then winks, before the ad cuts to a scene of a woman with the same face performing in a pornographic video.

The Kromix app, which was hosted by Apple’s App Store prior to a request for comment from WIRED, invites paid users to upload photos so that it can use them in scenarios including “bedroom rape” and “Disney love.” Videos on the app also feature AI-generated pornographic videos of women wearing Spider-Man costumes. Requests for comment sent to a contact listed in the app went unanswered.

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SpaceX's most recent Starship test flight may have ended July 24, but its mission isn't over yet.

The spacecraft splashed down in the Indian Ocean intact after flying halfway around the world from SpaceX's launch base in South Texas. Engineers expected the ship's life to end with a fiery disintegration after toppling over, just as past Starships have done following splashdown.

Numerous onboard sensors and cameras, along with buoys and drones in position at the splashdown zone, have provided important data for SpaceX to assess the performance of the ship's heat shield after each test flight, so officials accepted the post-flight conflagrations. That day, Starship tipped over and remained intact, surprising just about everyone.

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Three former SpaceX engineers have switched their attention from making rocket engines to manufacturing steel parts by using AI-driven software and robots. Their immediate goal involves establishing a prototype factory that can automate most of the steel fabrication process for crucial infrastructure components by 2027.

The startup, called 1872, officially launched on July 22 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at its Factory One facility in Cincinnati, Ohio. The company is initially focused on automating the manufacturing of steel skids—rectangular steel frames that can provide a moveable foundation for modular buildings—with the goal of supplying customers who are developing AI data centers or small modular nuclear reactors.

“We're building towards autonomy, but we're not necessarily building in a dogmatic fashion towards full autonomy,” Dan Summers, CEO of 1872, told Ars. “We may achieve 80 percent autonomous operations, and we may decide that it makes sense to stop there because there's just diminishing returns to go to full 100 percent.”

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Nvidia has disclosed that it owns nearly 123 million shares in SpaceX, further highlighting the chipmaker’s entangled financial relationships with some of its biggest customers.

The $5.5 trillion company owned SpaceX stock worth nearly $21 billion at the end of June, according to an SEC filing on Friday. Elon Musk’s rocket conglomerate’s shares have fallen sharply since its June initial public offering, meaning Nvidia’s stake would now be worth $17 billion.

The disclosure marks a huge pay-off on Nvidia’s investment in xAI, completed in January, shortly before Musk combined the AI lab with SpaceX.

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This should be a golden era of launch.

During the last three years, an average of 270 orbital rockets have launched from Earth, a more than threefold increase from only a decade ago. By every metric available, the launch industry is crushing it: Prices have never been more competitive, launches never more frequent, and access to space never more rapid.

Paradoxically, though, there is a growing crunch in launch availability.

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A decade ago, SpaceX began to land the first stages of the Falcon 9 rocket with some regularity, but it's only within the last five years that the company has begun flying the rocket dozens and then hundreds of times a year.

As a result, SpaceX has very rapidly become responsible for more than three-quarters of all mass launched into orbit. Much of this is the company's Starlink satellites, but due to cost and the lack of alternatives, SpaceX has also stepped up to launch payloads from all comers, including direct competitors such as Amazon, Northrop Grumman, AST Space Mobile, OneWeb, and more.

New research is beginning to quantify just how much the introduction of the Falcon 9 rocket, the adoption of reuse, and the vehicle's high cadence have upended the global launch market.

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This year is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the original Quake by id Software, if you could believe it. To commemorate that, publisher Bethesda has released a new campaign chapter for the game, titled "Dawn of the Machine."

This is part of a series of new campaign chapters, all developed by MachineGames "in collaboration with id Software." MachineGames is best known for making the games in the relatively recent Wolfenstein reboot series, as well as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The Quake maps are made by a team dubbed "Quake Club," which includes several MachineGames employees who work on Quake maps in their spare time.

The ambition and scope of some of these maps is beyond what was typical for Quake maps back in the late '90s, thanks in part to the team's use of TrenchBroom, a newer map editor that works well on modern systems and is easier to work with and more capable than what folks were using in those days.

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Elon Musk's X is trying to revive a lawsuit against advertisers it's accusing of illegally boycotting the social media platform, despite previously reaching a settlement to end litigation against an ad-industry trade group.

"This case involves an unusually brazen group boycott," X said in a filing yesterday. "That misconduct has drawn the attention of regulators and Congress. There is no valid reason that this effort by the direct victim to recover its massive economic losses from that boycott should not move forward."

X's lawsuit was thrown out in March when US District Judge Jane Boyle in the Northern District of Texas ruled that advertisers did not commit any antitrust violation. Last week, Musk reached a settlement with the World Federation of Advertisers, the first defendant named in the lawsuit.

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SpaceX says it has a plan for Starlink Mobile to compete against the big three wireless carriers and take a large number of customers away from them.

SpaceX has so far partnered with traditional mobile carriers to supplement their ground-based networks with Starlink satellite capacity, mainly to ensure coverage from space in dead zones not reached by cell towers. But SpaceX is buying spectrum licenses that would let it offer its own terrestrial service to compete directly against the big carriers, and the firm's top executives said in yesterday's earnings call they plan to do just that.

"The spectrum that we purchased from EchoStar does have terrestrial components, so we definitely intend to build out the terrestrial component," SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in response to questions on the earnings call. "So you will have not only the capacity from the satellites themselves, but you will have a buildout of the terrestrial, basically the hardware and systems necessary to make a true mobile service exactly what you want it to be."

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Over the past few years, it has become a rather rare treat when I end up genuinely, unequivocally enjoying the latest superhero film. Mostly I find them to be middling entertainment, sometimes a bit dull—and for The Eternals, nearly unwatchable—with the notable exception of 2024's Deadpool & Wolverine and last year's Thunderbolts*.

Add Spider-Man: Brand New Day to that list of exceptions. Tom Holland's latest outing as the titular web-slinger reminds us that superhero movies can still be very, very good—as much about well-drawn characters with interesting developmental arcs and well-timed emotional beats as CGI-filled action extravaganzas. There's plenty of the latter in Brand New Day, of course, but it's the grounded humanity at its heart that makes director Destin Daniel Cretton's film work so well.

(Spoilers below but no major reveals until after the gallery. We'll give you a heads up when we get there)

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Disney is “exploring a free product” for streaming customers, CEO Josh D’Amaro confirmed in a call with investors today.

D’Amaro, who succeeded Bob Iger as Disney’s chief in March, said that a free Disney-owned streaming service would help Disney reach more “price-sensitive” customers, which is a “strategic priority” for Disney, according to a transcript of the call.

A free streaming service would also generate more ad revenue, which has become increasingly important for streaming services challenged by plateauing subscriber numbers, subscriber churn, and competition from cheaper and free rivals.

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SpaceX shares dropped on Wednesday after Elon Musk’s plans for blockbuster spending to position his AI and rocket company as a data center developer spooked investors.

SpaceX surpassed analysts’ expectations in Tuesday’s debut earnings report, posting quarterly revenues of $7.8 billion, well above analysts’ estimates of $6.82 billion and up 92 percent from a year earlier. It posted a net loss of about $541 million, better than estimates of $2.12 billion.

But shares in SpaceX fell 10 percent in early trading after it reported capital expenditure of almost $16 billion on AI, double the previous quarter and well above Wall Street’s expectations. It said spending would persist at current levels for at least two more quarters.

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SpaceX and the state of Louisiana are close to finalizing a deal for the launch company to acquire about 130,000 acres along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

There have been persistent rumors about such an agreement for months, but now The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate reports that Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry is expected to announce the agreement later this month.

The deal would give SpaceX control of an 18-mile stretch of marshland southwest of Lafayette. The site, known as Pecan Island, became available as part of a legal settlement that resolves dozens of lawsuits that blame ExxonMobil for pollution and coastal land loss, the newspaper reports.

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Netflix has been sued after admitting that an unencrypted drive containing an unreleased, hotly anticipated 2026 blockbuster starring Nicolas Cage was stolen from its offices.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, Netflix was accused of waiting a week to warn the production company, Op-Fortitude, that the movie, Fortitude, was swiped, along with other drives that were “stolen right off a Netflix desk.”

“Someone stole a good amount of drives from our office desks this past week,” Sean Berney, director of Netflix Original Film, said in an email to a production company representative after several attempts to get Netflix to return the drives were allegedly ignored.

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