DJ Henderson

Meta, TikTok can’t toss wrongful death suit from mom of “subway surfing” teen

algorithm, bytedance, Meta, Policy, recommended content, Section 230, tiktok, wrongful death / DJ Henderson / June 30, 2025

Section 230 has so far failed to shield Meta and TikTok owner ByteDance from a lawsuit raised by a mother who alleged that her son’s wrongful death followed a flood of “subway surfing” videos platforms intentionally targeted to teens in New York.

In a decision Monday, New York State Supreme Court Judge Paul Goetz largely denied social media companies’ motions to dismiss claims they argued should be barred under Section 230 and the First Amendment. Goetz said that the mother, Norma Nazario, had adequately alleged that subway surfing content “was purposefully fed” to her son Zackery “because of his age” and “not because of any user inputs that indicated he was interested in seeing such content.”

Unlike other Section 230 cases in which platforms’ algorithms were determined to be content-neutral, Goetz wrote that in this case, “it is plausible that the social media defendants’ role exceeded that of neutral assistance in promoting content and constituted active identification of users who would be most impacted by the content.”

Platforms may be forced to demystify algorithms

Moving forward, Nazario will have a chance to seek discovery that could show exactly how Zackery came to interact with the subway surfing content. In her complaint, she did not ask for the removal of all subway surfing content but rather wants to see platforms held accountable for allegedly dangerous design choices that supposedly target unwitting teens.

“Social media defendants should not be permitted to actively target young users of its applications with dangerous ‘challenges’ before the user gives any indication that they are specifically interested in such content and without warning,” Nazario has argued.

And if she’s proven right, that means platforms won’t be forced to censor any content but must instead update algorithms to stop sending “dangerous” challenges to keep teens engaged at a time when they’re more likely to make reckless decisions, Goetz suggested.

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Trump’s tariff threat pushes Canada to scrap digital services tax

Canada, digital services tax, Donald Trump, DST, Policy, tariffs / DJ Henderson / June 30, 2025

In a sudden reversal, Canada has caved and will remove its digital services tax after trade talks with the US suddenly fell apart this weekend.

Blocked just hours before taking effect, the controversial digital services tax (DST) would have charged big US tech companies like Apple, Google, and Meta a 3 percent tax on all digital services revenue earned from Canadian users. Frustrating US tech giants, Canada also sought to collect retroactive taxes dating back to 2022.

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump claimed the tax was a “direct and blatant attack” on US tech companies and terminated the trade talks, while threatening to impose a new tariff rate on Canadian goods by July 4.

On Sunday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seemingly bowed to Trump’s pressure campaign, abruptly doing an “about turn” after previously refusing to pause the DST despite Trump’s opposition, NBC News reported.

But it wasn’t just Trump pushing Carney to reconsider the tax. A nonprofit representing CEOs and leaders of some of Canada’s biggest businesses, the Business Council of Canada, had warned that Carney defending the tax risked “undermining Canada’s economic relationship with its most important trading partner,” Al Jazeera reported.

If Trump were to impose new tariffs on Canada, it could have “large ripple effects across both economies,” the Council warned, potentially disrupting markets for automobiles, minerals, energy, and aluminum. And Trump—who has been bashing Canada with annexation threats throughout trade talks—had also threatened a Section 301 investigation into impacts of the DST on the US economy, which meant other punitive measures could be coming if the DST wasn’t removed. To Canada’s business leaders, the costs of defending the DST were seemingly becoming too high.

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SCOTUS upholds part of ACA that makes preventive care fully covered

ACA, health, preventive services, US Supreme Court, USPSTF / DJ Henderson / June 28, 2025

The USPSTF is made up of 16 medical experts who carefully review scientific data and run models to assess what preventive health interventions are best, using a framework of recommendation gradings from A to F. Any recommendations graded A or B by the task force are required by the ACA to be covered by health plans at no cost to patients.

The US health department argued that the task force members are, in fact, appointed, and under control of the health secretary, a role currently filled by anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Two lower courts in Texas sided with the Christian group, saying that the government violated the appointments clause.

But today, in a 6–3 ruling, the Supreme Court disagreed. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor made up the majority.

Writing on their behalf, Kavanaugh explained: “Task Force members are supervised and directed by the Secretary, who in turn answers to the President, preserving the chain of command in Article II.”

While the ruling means that coverage of preventive health care is no longer under threat, the ruling clarifies that the health secretary has direct authority over the USPSTF. The clarification raises concern that the current secretary, Kennedy, could remove task force members and/or undo recommendations to suit his personal ideology, as he is now doing with the vaccine advisory board at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Childhood and Education #11: The Art of Learning

Childhood / DJ Henderson / June 28, 2025

In honor of the latest (always deeply, deeply unpopular) attempts to destroy tracking and gifted and talented programs, and other attempts to get children to actually learn things, I thought it a good time to compile a number of related items.

Gifted programs and educational tracking are also super duper popular, it is remarkably absurd that our political process cannot prevent these programs from being destroyed.

As in things like this keep happening:

NY Post: Seattle Public Schools shuts down gifted and talented program for being oversaturated with white and asian students.

Once again, now, we face that threat in my home of New York City. The Democratic nominee for New York City Mayor is opposed to gifted and talented programs, and wants to destroy them. Yet few people seem to have much noticed, or decided to much care. Once people realize the danger it may well be too late.

To state the obvious, if you group children by ability in each subject rather than age, they learn better. Yes, there are logistical concerns, but the benefits are immense. Gifted programs are great but mostly seem like a patch to the fact that we are so obsessed with everyone in the room being in the same ‘grade’ at all times.

I agree with Tracing Woods that ‘teaches each according to their ability’ is the bare minimum before I will believe that your institution is making a real attempt to educate children.

Tracing Woods: A good example of the absurdity of “grade-level” thinking, from Texas: “If they’re reading on a second-grade level, but they’re in the third grade, they’re always going to receive that third-grade instruction.”

This makes no sense. Learning does not simply follow age.

Imagine having a “grade level” in chess. 9-year-olds in the third grade advancing to play against 1100 elo players. 100 more elo per year.

“Grade-level performance” has always been nonsensical. Learning does not work that way. Just figure out what people actually know and need

Danielle Fong: sooner or later, and probably sooner, all this will be thrown out in favor of an adaptive learning environment, the human teachers and other students can give individual attention when you’re stuck, and you can maxx out learning like a game. already happening privately. +2sd

Eowyn Jackman: I know I’m supposed to move on but I don’t think I can ever forgive the US public primary education complex for testing me and saying he “has a college reading level” at 9 years old but not administering an exam for me to be in the “gifted/advanced” classes at my PWI until two years later when I wrote my first book. So much time wasted.

Would’ve loved to have an office, secretarial job before 15 tbch

Wow I need therapy 😅

James Miller: Imagine math classes grouped by ability, not age. You’d have classes with 7- and 17-year-olds together.

Tracing Woods: And that’s a good thing (No, but seriously, at that point put them in different schools)

I bite the bullet. I do think it’s fine and actively good to have 7-year-olds and 17-year-olds in the same math classroom.

Of course, if you think that learning is bad, you won’t like this plan to have kids learn.

Owen Cyclops: this conception of early childhood education poses a generally unasked question to our present educational paradigm, which is: what could be the potential downside of learning things too quickly? from my perspective, this is basically never asked. its a total 100% blind spot.

[this is part of a long thread complaining about how awful it is if kids were to learn things too quickly, before they are supposed to, because ‘stages of development’]

Thomas: The main downside brought up re: “learning too quickly” is being ahead of peers. There’s parents’ posts online sharing experiences of being told not to read to their kid at home, or not teach them new math concepts.

Divia: Fwiw I hear people talk about the downside of learning too fast constantly! And have since I was a kid. Mostly whenever anyone wanted academics to be faster than it was convenient for someone they would talk about the downsides IME.

The ‘learning too much too soon is bad’ paradigm seems categorically insane. Here’s the concrete example Owen gives:

Owen: i’m in the forest (this actually happened). a kid asks: why is this log making a sound when i hit it with a stick? and this adult says, “well, the molecules in the log vibrate when you hit it, because you hitting it transfers energy into the log. you’re hearing the vibrations.”

the kid is NOT at that developmental stage (in my opinion). even if they can understand this (may be impossible, they might just be repeating what you’re saying), that type of understanding comes later. that is not the developmental stage a five year old is at. not their world.

I mean, maybe they have enough physics that this is the right explanation. Maybe they don’t, and it would be modestly better to simplify it a bit. But then they can ask.

This seems fine, and opening the doors to ‘what’s a molecule?’ or other similar questions seems great. They ask, you tell them. The actual objection here is ‘you need to explain [A] then [B] then [C]’ and I think that is usually vastly overstated but okay, sure, that doesn’t tell you what age you should tell people [C].

At some point, if you’re far enough ahead or behind the class, the class is worthless to you. A remarkable number of students hit this threshold, or would hit it if they weren’t being sabotaged to not hit it.

There is a point of diminishing returns for sufficiently young students, where you start to outstrip your ability to efficiently process the information and learn the material at your current age, but many students are very far away from that limit. As of course they are, if they’re forced to proceed at the speed of the typical subpar ship, which shall we say is not close to even that ship’s maximum speed.

Tracing Woodgrains: The most refreshing and novel thing to me about the Alpha/GT School model is the four hours of extracurricular workshops.

In sixth grade, I did online school. Completed the entire seventh and eighth grade curriculum in two hours a day that year. And then with all my extra time, I played video games.

Much healthier to have an institution that recognizes what can really be done with all of that time.

Patrick McKenzie: While this makes me feel *extremelyold, my recollection of 4th-8th grade was a solid 1.5-2 years of instruction and 3 years of being physically present while classroom management was conducted.

If you object to being physically present for classroom management you will become one of the focuses of classroom management, so I spent a lot of time counting ceiling tiles, drawing cubes, and writing out the solutions for all possible games of 24.

Ryan Moulton: I think you can get 80% of the benefit of ~whatever gifted/tracking/etc. program in gradeschool by having any mechanism at all to let self directed kids be self directed.

“You already know this, so just go do Khan Academy for an hour during math time” is an essentially zero cost intervention.

“If you finish your grammar/spelling/vocab sheet early, you are allowed to read your library book” is too.

Teachers don’t reliably do this, because letting kids do different things sometimes creates conflict in class. If they did reliably do this then most of the debate about how to organize gradeschool among kids of different academic ability levels goes away.

When you stop holding kids back, you instead get things like in this thread: The 11 year old boy in Organic Chemistry that goes on to be a researcher, the girl graduating college at that same age. Which is proof by counterexample that all this ‘not ready’ nonsense is indeed nonsense.

An important aspect of denying the reality of different learning abilities is that it is absurdly cruel to those you are gaslighting – they are told that they are just as smart and good at learning as everyone else, so what are they to think about their failure to get those same results?

Anonymous: We have this myth of a ‘fast learner’ but research suggests people actually learn at similar rates. A ‘fast learner’ is really just someone who’s been exposed to this problem/material before, maybe multiple times. People seeing something for the first time will struggle.

Eigenrobot: there’s something cruel about asserting that people dont differ in ability like. its cruel to directly rub it in someones face, but its also cruel to proactively lie to people when, be real, they either know youre lying or will end up damaged by believing you.

Some may say “maybe but acknowledging difference in ability is bad because the moral value is a function of their ability and we don’t want a norm of believing that some people are worthless” and to them i say find god.

What happened with No Child Left Behind? One of its architects explains that they knew you can’t actually leave no child behind. That’s impossible. You obviously have to leave some children behind. They were declaring a goal of none with the plan to modifying it to some. Then they met Congress, which has become unable to do reasonable things, so instead of the usual ‘quietly change the rules and declare victory’ the insane requirements stayed on the books and everything went to hell trying to work around them. Whoops.

The good news is that now everyone knows that Congress is unable to fix broken things, so we can correctly plan that laws will stay on the books indefinitely exactly as written no matter how broken they get, and write them accordingly. I endorse both the fully serious and sarcastic versions of that sentence.

Reading is a godsend. The earlier your kids can read, the better, on so many levels. One that is vastly underestimated is this makes parenting vastly easier, you’ve unlocked unlimited cheap, healthy and non-disruptive education and entertainment. It unlocks all the things.

Erik Hoel here says that with a year of dedicated effort, he got his 3-year-old to read at 9-year-old levels, and offers a guide: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. The core is simple, phonics plus spaced repetition plus books as the center of entertainment. In my experience, you need to push to the critical point where they can largely teach themselves via more reading plus a little adult help (and AI voice help?) and then you are home free.

Eric seems to have focused entirely on reading first and ignored other subjects, including math, while he was doing that. This actually seems exactly right to me, if you can (as he did) get your child to buy in, because reading unlocks all the things and builds on itself. Get to that critical point first, worry about everything else (that isn’t a short term practical need) later.

A woman virtuously notices she is confused about why mirrors work the way they do and asks, essentially, ‘mirrors how do they even work,’ as opposed to most other people who have no idea how mirrors work the way they do. That’s great, thumbs up.

Then this gets quoted with ‘this is why we need the department of education,’ but no, actually we had a department of education and not only does no one know no one asks the question. This is why you don’t need the department of education. You need an LLM, and you need to teach people to be curious and give them actual education.

We all know it works. So why don’t schools use it?

Eric Hoel: “The power of spaced repetition has been known for 150 years. It replicates and has large effects. So why is spaced repetition (or even its more implementable form of spiral learning) not used all the time in classrooms? No one knows!”

Spaced repetition works so well that it ends up causing me to memorize a lot of spoilers that I actively don’t want to remember. As in, I’ll keep trying not to think of the pink elephant, to remind myself to forget, at increasingly long intervals, which cause me to remember, and whoops. Damn it. One could use this power for good.

Paper suggests new way to teach economics nonlinearly, supposedly so it will line up with how people learn. I think this is essentially ‘include spaced repetition in your lecture plan.’ Which is one of those obviously good ideas that no one implements.

bosco: 4yo is probably ready to memorize her address, and at least one phone number, in case of emergencies, but she is completely uninterested when I try to teach her the spiel any tips?

Niels Hoven: If you’re having trouble getting your kid to remember your phone number, make it the password to your iPad’s lock screen and watch how quickly they memorize it

Kelsey Piper: We’ve been encouraging the eight year old to pick up some history by saying to one another in front of her “oh, the switch passcode is the year of the Marco Polo bridge incident” or “yeah I changed it to the year Constantinople was sacked in the Fourth Crusade.”

It seems like something you could study and measure, but it seems no one has?

Pamela Hobart: why do so few people have any real insight into just how *verydisruptive interruptions are?

today’s painful reminder via @PepsMccrea

I’m not even sure ‘learning time lost’ is the right measure, as time is not created equal, and there are different types of learning, some of which are far more disruptable than others, so this can shift learning composition, likely in ways we do not want.

The problem, identified.

Ben Hsieh: Parents will likely say, “Drills and rote memorization? That pales in comparison to my strategy, instilling a lifelong love of learning,” and then not instill a lifelong love of learning.

Drills and rote memorization are not ideal, but they work. If you can do better, great, but way too many parents and schools think they can do better and are wrong.

Autumn: if as a society we value math-based disciplines so much, can i ask why we teach calculus in a way thats optimized to weed out students who wont comply with hazing. why do we design them to teach horrible habits for later studies in math?

Sarah Constantin: this is a pet peeve of mine.

there are people who want to make classes easier & less advanced (e.g. not teaching calculus in high school) and there are people who want to scout for exceptional talent but there’s very few people pushing for actually teaching the material well!

“let’s try to make sure everyone in this calculus class learns calculus” is a very lonely mission, even though IMO it’s common sense.

In general we have the problem of teaching math in ways that make many students hate math. I don’t think this is especially a problem in calculus, at least the way I learned it (in a high school class)? Autumn suggests the college method is somehow worse.

Obviously ‘won’t comply with hazing’ is a terrible reason to drive someone away, calculus is vital to understanding the world (for intuition and general understanding, not for actually Doing Calculus, I actively do a happy dance every time I get do Do Calculus which is very rare) and at minimum we want everyone who takes such a class to learn calculus.

However, in terms of the math-based disciplines, as long as we are gating on actual ability I think weeding people out here is in principle fine? In the sense that if you design a good filter, you’re doing a favor for those you filter out, except that now they don’t get to understand calculus.

I strongly agree with this. It is very obvious interacting with kids that they yearn for meaningful work in the ordinary sense of work

Ozy Brennan: my pet parenting theories:

Children yearn for meaningful work; child labor is bad but we’ve overcorrected.

Whenever possible, children should be brought along to adult activities instead of adults going to child activities.

tips for bringing kids along to adult activities: bring a Kindle or (in extreme situations) a laptop. explain behavioral norms ahead of time. allow independence. have friends who like kids. prioritize activities you and kids both like (museums, movies, parks, whatever).

Putting children to pointless industrial work is not a good idea. But if they can understand why what they are doing is useful, yeah, they really dig it, and it seems obviously great for them and also great for you.

For trips, you have to calibrate to your particular kids, but yes, absolutely, especially once the kids cross the ‘can be entertained by a book’ threshold.

Patrick Collison: In which domains are elite practitioners celebrating the kids being better than ever before? Would love to read about a few instances. (Not just where there’s one particular genius, such as Ashwin Sah’s recent success, but where “the kids” as some kind of aggregate appear to be improving.)

Michael Nielsen: It was perhaps in my third week of linear algebra (MP 174!) that the professor told me that incoming students were noticeably worse at math than they used to be There are a very large number of potential confounders here. The point, of course: that was ~30 years ago. “Back when I was a boy…” nostalgia seems to be time-invariant.

I’ll state my prejudice, backed by a wide smattering of anecdotes, and not much else: the top 0.1% today are vastly more competent across a much wider range of subjects than 20 years ago. And that same statement was also true 20 years ago. And 40 years ago. And 60 years ago…

(I don’t mean that a given individual is more competent in every domain. But the ceiling per-domain will be higher, and the range of domains much broader.)

For comparison, the 1939 Putnam, where (IIRC) Feynman was Putnam Fellow. And the 2023 Putnam. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather take the first.

Charles: I think the answer to this is “all of them” or close to it. The very best teenagers at almost every endeavor are better than they’ve ever been.

It’s below the 90th percentile (maybe even higher) where it’s a different story.

Is are children learning? In high school math, the answer seems to be no. The 50th percentile student gets a 230 in 8th grade on this test, and then a 234 in 12th (a second source said 232→237, but that’s the same thing), and we know from the higher percentiles that the test is not being saturated here. Note that reading scores only increased 5 points, from 224→229.

The obvious question is, if students are learning this little, why are we wasting their childhoods in school at all? It seems like there is no point. One would think that at least this much improvement would happen via osmosis and practical learning.

Paul Graham: 13 yo asked me to teach him how to write essays. I asked if he wanted to learn how to write real essays, or the kind you have to write in school. He said the school kind, because he’s writing one for school.

I don’t mind if my kids have to learn math that’s not real math or writing that’s not real writing or science that’s just words, but at the same time as I teach them these things I always try to give them an idea of how they’re fake, and what the real version is like.

At least 13 yo won’t spend years puzzling over how the “conclusion” is supposed to be different from the “introduction” even though they’re saying the same things. I told him upfront it’s just an artifact of this fake format.

RashLabs: How does one write a good essay for school?

Paul Graham: You just write a good essay. But your teachers may freak out if you do.

Patrick McKenzie: Good essays disrupt the production function of teachers w/r/t essay grading/correction. Some teachers give some students a bit of leeway to take more of their cycles than generally required, some of the time.

I once wrote an essay about how the hamburger essay format (buns on top and bottom, three layers in middle) was artificial, limiting, and unengaging, and got a talking to which was… at least minimally helpful.

There are some skills, especially more basic things like spelling and grammar, where the two types of good line up. Being able to write a good School Essay does give you a leg up on a Real Essay, if you don’t get trapped in the arbitrary parts of the format. But past a certain point, they are very different skills.

Paul is nailing the key point. Which is, if a child must write a School Essay, it is vital not to gaslight them about what they are writing, or pretend it has much to do with a Real Essay. Never pretend the fake thing is not fake.

Discussion about this post

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NASA tested a new SLS booster that may never fly, and the end of it blew off

artemis, human spaceflight, L3Harris, launch, NASA, Northrop Grumman, Science, Space, space launch system / DJ Henderson / June 27, 2025

NASA didn’t want to say much about one of the tests, and the other one lost its nozzle.

An uncontained plume of exhaust appeared near the nozzle of an SLS solid rocket booster moments before its nozzle was destroyed during a test-firing Thursday. Credit: NASA

NASA’s Space Launch System appears to have a finite shelf life. The Trump administration wants to cancel it after just three launches, while the preliminary text of a bill making its way through Congress would extend it to five flights.

But chances are low the Space Launch System will make it to nine flights, and if it does, it’s questionable that it would reach that point before 2040. The SLS rocket is a core piece of NASA’s plan to return US astronauts to the Moon under the Artemis program, but the White House seeks to cancel the program in favor of cheaper commercial alternatives.

For the second time in less than a week, NASA test-fired new propulsion hardware Thursday that the agency would need to keep SLS alive. Last Friday, a new liquid-fueled RS-25 engine ignited on a test stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. The hydrogen-fueled engine is the first of its kind to be manufactured since the end of the Space Shuttle program. This particular RS-25 engine is assigned to power the fifth flight of the SLS rocket, a mission known as Artemis V.

Then, on Thursday of this week, NASA and Northrop Grumman test-fired a new solid rocket booster in Utah. This booster features a new design that NASA would use to power SLS rockets beginning with the ninth mission, or Artemis IX. The motor tested on Thursday isn’t flight-worthy. It’s a test unit that engineers will use to gather data on the rocket’s performance.

While the engine test in Mississippi apparently went according to plan, the ground firing of the new solid rocket booster didn’t go quite as smoothly. Less than two minutes into the burn, the motor’s exhaust nozzle violently shattered into countless shards of debris. You can watch the moment in the YouTube video below.

At the start of the program nearly 15 years ago, NASA and its backers in Congress pitched the SLS rocket as the powerhouse behind a new era of deep space exploration. The Space Launch System, they said, would have the advantage of recycling old space shuttle engines and boosters, fast-tracking the new rocket’s path to the launch pad for less money than the cost of an all-new vehicle.

That didn’t pan out. Each Artemis mission costs $4.2 billion per flight, and that’s with shuttle-era engines and boosters that NASA and its contractors already have in their inventories. NASA’s 16 leftover shuttle main engines are enough for the first four SLS flights. NASA has leftover parts for eight pairs of solid rocket boosters.

It has been 10 years

Recognizing that shuttle-era parts will eventually run out, NASA signed a contract with Aerojet Rocketdyne to set the stage for the production of new RS-25 engines in 2015. NASA later ordered an initial batch of six RS-25 engines from Aerojet, then added 18 more to the order in 2020, at a price of about $100 million per engine. NASA and its contractor aim to reduce the cost to $70 million per engine, but even that figure is many times the cost of engines of comparable size and power: Blue Origin’s BE-4 and SpaceX’s Raptor.

Finally, NASA test-fired a new flight-rated RS-25 engine for the first time last week at Stennis Space Center. The agency has often provided a livestream of its engine tests at Stennis, but it didn’t offer the public any live video. And this particular test was a pretty big deal. L3Harris, which acquired Aerojet Rocketdyne in 2023, has finally reactivated the RS-25 production line after a decade and billions of dollars of funding.

In fact, NASA made no public statement about the RS-25 test until Monday, and the agency didn’t mention its assignment to fly on the Artemis V mission. If the Trump administration gets its way, the engine will never fly. Maybe that’s fine, but after so long with so much taxpayer investment, this is a milestone worth publicizing, if not celebrating.

L3Harris issued a press release Tuesday confirming the engine’s planned use on the fifth SLS mission. The engine completed a 500-second acceptance test, throttling up to 111 percent of rated thrust, demonstrating more power than engines that flew on the space shuttle or on the first SLS launch in 2022.

A new RS-25 engine, No. 20001, was installed on its test stand in Mississippi earlier this year. Credit: NASA

“This successful acceptance test shows that we’ve been able to replicate the RS-25’s performance and reliability, while incorporating modern manufacturing techniques and upgraded components such as the main combustion chamber, nozzle, and pogo accumulator assembly,” said Kristin Houston, president of space propulsion and power systems at Aerojet Rocketdyne, L3Harris. “Our propulsion technology is key to ensuring the United States leads in lunar exploration, creates a sustained presence on the Moon and does not cede this strategic frontier to other nations.”

The test-firing last Friday came a few days before the 50th anniversary of the first space shuttle main engine test at Stennis on June 24, 1975. That engine carried the serial number 0001. The new RS-25 engine is designated No. 20001.

Watch out

NASA followed last week’s low-key engine test with the test-firing of a solid-fueled booster at Northrop Grumman’s rocket test site in Promontory, Utah, on Thursday. Held in place on its side, the booster produced 3.9 million pounds of thrust, outclassing the power output of the existing boosters assigned to the first eight SLS missions.

Unlike the RS-25 firing at Stennis, NASA chose to broadcast the booster test. Everything appeared to go well until 1 minute and 40 seconds into the burn, when a fiery plume of super-hot exhaust appeared to burn through part of the booster’s structure just above the nozzle. Moments later, the nozzle disintegrated.

Solid rocket boosters can’t be turned off after ignition, and for better or worse, the motor continued firing until it ran out of propellant about 30 seconds later. The rocket sparked a fire in the hills overlooking the test stand.

This was the first test-firing of the Booster Obsolescence and Life Extension (BOLE) program, which aims to develop a higher-performance solid rocket booster for SLS missions. NASA awarded Northrop Grumman a $3.2 billion contract in 2021 to produce boosters with existing shuttle parts for five SLS missions (Artemis IV-VIII), and design, develop, and test a new booster design for Artemis IX.

The boosters produce more than 75 percent of the thrust required to propel the SLS rocket off the launch pad with NASA’s crewed Orion spacecraft on top. Four RS-25 engines power the core stage, collectively generating more than 2 million pounds of thrust.

Northrop Grumman calls the new booster “the largest and most powerful segmented solid rocket motor ever built for human spaceflight.”

One of the most significant changes with the BOLE booster design is that it replaces shuttle-era steel cases with carbon-fiber composite cases. Northrop says the new cases are lighter and stronger. It also replaces the booster’s hydraulic thrust vector control steering system with an electronic system. The propellant packed inside the booster is also different, using a mix that Northrop packs inside its commercial rocket motors instead of the recipe used for the space shuttle.

Northrop Grumman has had a tough time with rocket nozzles in recent years. In 2019, a test motor for the company’s now-canceled Omega rocket lost its nozzle during a test-firing in Utah. Then, last year, a smaller Northrop-made booster flying on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket lost its nozzle in flight. Vulcan’s guidance system and main engines corrected for the problem, and the rocket still achieved its planned orbit.

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Google begins rolling out AI search in YouTube

AI, ai search, Artificial Intelligence, Google, Tech, youtube / DJ Henderson / June 26, 2025

Over the past year, Google has transformed its web search experience with AI, driving toward a zero-click experience. Now, the same AI focus is coming to YouTube, and Premium subscribers can get a preview of the new search regime. Select searches on the video platform will now produce an AI-generated results carousel with a collection of relevant videos. Even if you don’t pay for YouTube, AI is still coming for you with an expansion of Google’s video chatbot.

Google says the new AI search feature, which appears at the top of the results page, will include multiple videos, along with an AI summary of each. You can tap the video thumbnails to begin playing them right from the carousel. The summary is intended to extract the information most relevant to your search query, so you may not even have to watch the videos.

The AI results carousel is only a test right now, and it’s limited to YouTube Premium subscribers. If you’re paying for Premium, you can enable the feature on YouTube’s experimental page. While the feature is entirely opt-in, that probably won’t last long. Like AI Overviews in search, this feature will take precedence over organic search results and get people interacting with Google’s AI, and that’s the driving force behind most of the company’s decisions lately.

It’s not hard to see where this feature could lead because we’ve seen the same thing play out in general web search. By putting AI-generated content at the top of search results, Google will reduce the number of videos people click to watch. The carousel gives you the relevant parts of the video along with a summary, but the video page is another tap away. Rather than opening videos, commenting, subscribing, and otherwise interacting with creators, some users will just peruse the AI carousel. That could make it harder for channels to grow and earn revenue from their content—the same content Google will feed into Gemini to generate the AI carousel.

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Apple’s push to take over the dashboard resisted by car makers

android auto, Apple, CarPlay, CarPlay Ultra, Cars, infotainment, syndication / DJ Henderson / June 25, 2025

Of the original 14 brands listed by Apple, Jaguar Land Rover said it was still evaluating the system, while Ford and Nissan along with its Infiniti brand said they had no information to share about future application.

According to a survey conducted by McKinsey in 2023, almost half the car buyers said they would not buy a vehicle that lacked Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, while 85 percent of car owners who have Apple CarPlay or a similar service preferred it over the auto group’s own built-in system.

Picture of infotainment system with CarPlay and Android Auto icons — Credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

Many carmakers, including Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi, have developed infotainment and operating systems, but they would continue to offer the option of using standard Apple CarPlay to meet consumer demand. Apple said customers were going to like CarPlay Ultra, and carmakers would ultimately respond to consumer demand.

BMW said it would integrate the existing Apple CarPlay with its new design, while Audi said its focus was to offer drivers “a customized and seamless digital experience,” so it would not use CarPlay Ultra, although the standard version was available on its vehicles.

While Volvo Cars said there were no plans to use CarPlay Ultra, its chief executive, Håkan Samuelsson, said carmakers should not try to compete on software with technology companies. “There are others who can do that better, and then we should offer that in our cars,” he said.

Aston Martin integrated Apple’s CarPlay Ultra with its newly developed infotainment system but stressed that the design inside the car remained “unmistakably” Aston Martin. The traditional physical dials were also available for those who do not want to use the touchscreen, it said.

People close to the carmaker said discussions with Apple in integrating CarPlay Ultra involved setting clear lines on data sharing from the start. The use of CarPlay Ultra did not entail additional sharing of vehicle data, which is stored inside Aston Martin’s own infotainment system and software. Apple also said vehicle data was not shared with the iPhone.

Graphic illustration by Ian Bott; additional reporting by Harry Dempsey in Tokyo.

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UK looking to loosen Google’s control of its search engine

antitrust, cma, competition, competition and markets authority, Google, Policy, syndication, UK / DJ Henderson / June 24, 2025

Other conduct rules that the CMA is considering include requirements in how it ranks its search results and for Google’s distribution partners such as Apple to offer “choice screens” to help consumers switch more easily between search providers.

The CMA said Alphabet-owned Google’s dominance made the cost of search advertising “higher than would be expected” in a more competitive market.

Google on Tuesday slammed the proposals as “broad and unfocused” and said they could threaten the UK’s access to its latest products and services.

Oliver Bethell, Google’s senior director for competition, warned that “punitive regulations” could change how quickly Google launches new products in the UK.

“Proportionate, evidence-based regulation will be essential to preventing the CMA’s road map from becoming a roadblock to growth in the UK,” he added.

Bethell’s warning of the potential impact of any regulations on the wider UK economy comes after the government explicitly mandated the CMA to focus on supporting growth and investment while minimizing uncertainty for businesses.

Google said last year that it planned to invest $1 billion in a huge new data center just outside London.

The CMA’s probe comes after Google lost a pair of historic US antitrust cases over its dominance of search and its lucrative advertising business.

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Google rolls out Street View time travel to celebrate 20 years of Google Earth

Google, Google Earth, Tech / DJ Henderson / June 24, 2025

After 20 years, being able to look at any corner of the planet in Google Earth doesn’t seem that impressive, but it was a revolution in 2005. Google Earth has gone through a lot of changes in that time, and Google has some more lined up for the service’s 20th anniversary. Soon, Google Earth will help you travel back in time with historic Street View integration, and pro users will get some new “AI-driven insights”—of course Google can’t update a product without adding at least a little AI.

Google Earth began its life as a clunky desktop client, but that didn’t stop it from being downloaded 100 million times in the first week. Today, Google Earth is available on the web, in mobile apps, and in the Google Earth Pro desktop app. However you access Earth, you’ll find a blast from the past.

For the service’s 20th anniversary, Google was inspired by a social media trend from last year in which people shared historical images of locations in Google Maps. Now, Google Earth is getting a “time travel” interface where you can see historical Street View images from almost any location.

Google Earth historical — Historical Street View images will be added to Google Earth. Credit: Google

While this part isn’t new, Google is also using the 20th anniversary as an opportunity to surface its 3D timelapse feature. These animations use satellite data to show how an area has changed from a higher vantage point. They’re just as cool as when they were announced in 2021.

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New body size database for marine animals is a “library of life”

biodiversity, Biology, databases, Ecology, marine animals, marine ecology, Science, Taxonomy / DJ Henderson / June 21, 2025

The ocean runs on size

McClain officially launched MOBS as a passion project while on sabbatical in 2022 but he had been informally collecting data on body size for various marine groups for several years before that. So he had a small set of data already to kick off the project, incorporating it all into a single large database with a consistent set format and style.

Craig McClain holding a giant isopod (Bathynomus giganteus), one of the deep sea’s most iconic crustaceans — Craig McClain holding a giant isopod (*Bathynomus giganteus*), one of the deep sea’s most iconic crustaceans Credit: Craig McClain

“One of the things that had prevented me from doing this before was the taxonomy issue,” said McClain. “Say you wanted to get the body size for all [species] of octopuses. That was not something that was very well known unless some taxonomist happened to publish [that data]. And that data was likely not up-to-date because new species are [constantly] being described.”

However, in the last five to ten years, the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) was established with the objective of cataloging all marine life, with taxonomy experts assigned to specific groups to determine valid new species, which are then added to the data set with a specific numerical code. McClain tied his own dataset to that same code, making it quite easy to update MOBS as new species are added to WoRMS. McClain and his team were also able to gather body size data from various museum collections.

The MOBS database focuses on body length (a linear measurement) as opposed to body mass. “Almost every taxonomic description of a new species has some sort of linear measurement,” said McClain. “For most organisms, it’s a length, maybe a width, and if you’re really lucky you might get a height. It’s very rare for anything to be weighed unless it’s an objective of the study. So that data simply doesn’t exist.”

While all mammals generally have similar density, “If you compare the density of a sea slug, a nudibranch, versus a jellyfish, even though they have the same masses, their carbon contents are much different,” he said. “And a one-meter worm that’s a cylinder and a one-meter sea urchin that’s a sphere are fundamentally different weights and different kinds of organisms.” One solution for the latter is to convert to volume to account for shape differences. Length-to-weight ratios can also differ substantially for different marine animal groups. That’s why McClain hopes to compile a separate database for length-to-weight conversions.

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A shark scientist reflects on Jaws at 50

Entertainment, film, jaws, Science, sharks, Steven Spielberg / DJ Henderson / June 21, 2025

We’re still afraid to go in the water

Ars chats with marine biologist David Shiffman about the film’s legacy—both good and bad.

Roy Scheider starred as Chief Martin Brody in the 1975 blockbuster Jaws. Credit: Universal Pictures

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster horror movie based on the bestselling novel by Peter Benchley. We’re marking the occasion with a tribute to this classic film and its enduring impact on the popular perception of sharks, shark conservation efforts, and our culture at large.

(Many spoilers below.)

Jaws tells the story of Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), the new police chief for Amity Island, a New England beach town and prime summer tourist attraction. But that thriving industry is threatened by a series of shark attacks, although the local mayor, Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), initially dismisses the possibility, ridiculing the findings of visiting marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss). The attacks keep escalating and the body count grows, until the town hires a grizzled shark hunter named Quint (Robert Shaw) to hunt down and kill the great white shark, with the help of Brody and Hooper.

Benchley wrote his novel after reading about a sports fisherman named Frank Mundus, who captured a very large shark in 1964; in fact, the character of Quint is loosely based on Mundus. Benchley wrote an early draft of the screenplay, which underwent multiple revisions during production. In the end, he estimated that his contributions amounted to the basic storyline and the mechanics. Spielberg wasn’t the studio’s first choice for director; initially they hired Dick Richards, but Richards kept referring to the shark as a whale. Eventually, he was fired and replaced with the 26-year-old Spielberg, who had just finished his first feature film (The Sugarland Express).

Spielberg was given a $3.5 million shooting budget and a timeframe of 55 days for filming. However, the production was troubled from the start, largely due to the director’s insistence on shooting on location in Martha’s Vineyard; Jaws was the first major film to be shot on the ocean. Spielberg later admitted, “I was pretty naive about Mother Nature and the hubris of a filmmaker who thinks he can conquer the elements was foolhardy.” Unwanted boats kept drifting into the frame; cameras kept getting waterlogged; Carl Gottlieb (who played the local news editor Meadows) was nearly decapitated by a propeller; Dreyfuss nearly got stuck in the shark cage; and several actors suffered from seasickness. Frustrated crew members took to calling the movie “Flaws.”

A shark strikes

“duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh….” Universal Pictures

There were three pneumatically powered full-sized mechanical sharks built for the shoot, nicknamed “Bruce,” and they kept malfunctioning. The pneumatic hoses kept taking on seawater; the skin was made of neoprene foam, which soaked up water and became bloated; and one of the models kept getting tangled up in seaweed. In the end, Spielberg opted to shoot most of the early scenes without ever showing the actual shark, which actually heightened the tension and suspense, especially when combined with John Williams’ ominous theme music (“duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh…”).

In the end, shooting ran for 159 days, and the budget ballooned to $9 million. All the delays gave Spielberg and his writers (especially Gottlieb) extra time to refine the script, often just prior to filming the scenes. A lot of the dialogue was improvised by the actors. And it was all worth it in the end, because Jaws went on to become a major summer box office success. All told, it grossed $476 million globally across all its theatrical releases and won three Oscars, although it lost Best Picture to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Jaws inspired many, many subsequent films, including Ridley Scott’s Alien in 1979, described in pitch meetings as “Jaws in space. Audience reactions were often extreme, with many people becoming fearful of swimming in the ocean for fear of sharks. And while the sequels were, shall we say, underwhelming, the original Jaws has stood the test of time. Ars spoke with marine biologist and shark conservationist David Shiffman, author of Why Sharks Matter, to discuss the film’s depiction of sharks and its enduring place in popular culture.

Ars Technica: Let’s start by talking about the enormous impact of the film, both good and bad, on the general public’s awareness of sharks.

David Shiffman: A lot of folks in both the marine science world and the ocean conservation communities have reported that Jaws in a lot of ways changed our world. It’s not that people used to think that sharks were cute, cuddly, adorable animals, and then after Jaws, they thought that they were bloodthirsty killing machines. They just weren’t on people’s minds. Fishermen knew about them, surfers thought about them, but that was about it. Most people who went to the beach didn’t pay much mind to what could be there. Jaws absolutely shattered that. My parents both reported that the summer that Jaws came out, they were afraid to go swimming in their community swimming pools.

No, really, the water’s fine!

“You knew.” The young boy’s mother (Lee Fierro) confronts Brody. Universal Pictures

David Shiffman: I have encountered people who were so scared that they were afraid to go in the bathtub. A lot of movies are very scary, but they don’t have that real-world impact. I love Jurassic Park, but I’m not afraid that a T. rex is going to eat me when I go into an outhouse, even though that’s about as realistic as what’s portrayed in Jaws. There’s something called the “Jaws Effect” in public policy literature, which is a way of measuring how fictional portrayals of real-world issues affect what citizens think about that issue and what policy preferences they support as a result. It’s fascinating how a fictional portrayal can do that, because I cannot stress enough: That is not what sharks look like or how they behave.

The movie also was the first time that a scientist was the hero. People half a generation above me have reported that seeing Richard Dreyfuss’ Hooper on the big screen as the one who saves the day changed their career trajectory. “You can be a scientist who studies fish. Cool. I want to do that.” In the time since Jaws came out, a lot of major changes have happened. One is that shark populations have declined globally by about 50 percent, and many species are now critically endangered.

And shark science has become much more professionalized. The American Elasmobranch Society—I’m on the board of directors—was founded in 1983, and now we have about 500 members in the US, Canada ,and Mexico. There have since been subsequent organizations founded in Australia and the Pacific Islands, Europe, South America, and a new one starting this year in Asia.

And then, from a cultural standpoint, we now have a whole genre of bad shark movies.

Ars Technica: Sharknado!

David Shiffman: Yes! Sharknado is one of the better of the bunch. Sitting on my desk here, we’ve got Sharkenstein, Raiders of the Lost Shark, and, of course, Shark Exorcist, all from the 2010s. I’ve been quoted as saying there’s two types of shark movie: There’s Jaws and there’s bad shark movies.

Ars Technica: Populations of the tiger shark, the great white, and couple of other species have declined so dramatically that many are on the verge of extinction. Is it just a coincidence that those declines started shortly after Jaws came out?

David Shiffman: The short answer is not that Jaws caused this, but that perhaps Jaws made it easier for it to happen because people weren’t outraged the way they might’ve been if it happened to say, whales, whose populations were also declining around the same time. The number one threat to shark species as a whole is unsustainable overfishing practices. People are killing too many sharks. Sustainable fisheries for sharks can and do exist, and the US largely has done a good job with this, but around the world, it’s a bad scene.

“A whole genre of bad shark movies”

For instance, shark fin soup started to be a problem around the 1980s thanks to the economic boom in China and the emergence of a new middle class there. Shark fin soup is a traditional Chinese and Southeast Asian delicacy. It’s associated with the emperor and his court. It’s not shark meat that’s used. It’s the little skeletal fin rays from the fins that are basically a bland, noodle-like substance when they’re dried and boiled. The purpose of this was for people to say, “I have so much money that I can eat these incredibly rare delicacies.” That was not caused by Jaws. But perhaps it was allowed to happen because there was less public sympathy for sharks.

It’s worth noting that shark fin soup and the shark fin trade is no longer the biggest or only threat to sharks. It hasn’t been in about 20 years. Ironically, a lot of that has to do with Chinese government efforts not to save the ocean, but to crack down on public corruption. A lot of government officials used to throw extravagant banquets for their friends and family. The new Chinese government said, “We’re not doing that anymore.” That alone saved a lot of endangered species. It was not motivated by concern about the state of the ocean, but it had that effect.

Ars Technica: People have a tendency to think that sharks are simply brutal killing machines. Why are they so important to the ecosystem?

David Shiffman: The title of my book is Why Sharks Matter because sharks do matter and people don’t think about them that way. These are food chains that provide billions of humans with food, including some of the poorest humans on Earth. They provide tens of millions of humans with jobs. When those food chains are disrupted, that’s bad for coastal communities, bad for food security and livelihoods. If we want to have healthy ocean food chains, we need a healthy top of the food chain, because when you lose the top of the food chain, the whole thing can unravel in unpredictable, but often quite devastating ways.

So sharks play important ecological roles by holding the food chain that we all depend on in place. They’re also not a significant threat to you and your family. More people in a typical year die from flower pots falling on their head when they walk down the street. More people in a typical year die falling off a cliff when they’re trying to take a selfie of the scenery behind them, than are killed by sharks. Any human death or injury is a tragedy, and I don’t want to minimize that. But when we’re talking about global-scale policy responses, the relative risk versus reward needs to be considered.

Ars Technica: There’s a scene in Jaws where Hooper is talking about his personal theory: territoriality, the idea that this rogue great white came in and made this his personal territory and now he’ll just keep feeding until the food runs out. Is that a real scientific premise from the 1970s and how valid is it?

The hunt begins

The town hires grizzled shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) to kill the great white shark. Universal Pictures

David Shiffman: Rogue sharks are nonsense. It is nonsense that is still held by some kooks who are ostensibly in my field, but it is not supported by any evidence whatsoever. In all of recorded human history, there is proof that exactly one shark bit more than one human. That was the Sharm el-Sheikh attacks around Christmas in Egypt a few years ago. Generally speaking, a lot of times it’s hard to predict why wild animals do or don’t do anything. But if this was a behavior that was real, there would be evidence that it happens and there isn’t any, despite a lot of people looking.

Was it commonly believed in the 1970s? No. Did Peter Benchley make it up? No. It’s a thing in some animals for sure. In some neighborhoods, people will pick up gators and move them hundreds of miles away; the gators will move back to that exact same spot. I think the same thing has been shown with bears. Wolves certainly have a home range. But for sharks, it’s not a thing.

Ars Technica: Quint has a famous monologue about surviving the USS Indianapolis sinking and witnessing crew members being eaten by sharks. How historically accurate is that?.

David Shiffman: We don’t really know how many of the people who were killed following the sinking of the Indianapolis were killed by sharks. Certainly, firsthand accounts report that sharks were present. But those people were in the water because they were on a boat that exploded after being hit by a torpedo. That is not good for your health. So a lot of those people were either mortally wounded or killed by that initial explosion, and then perhaps were scavenged by sharks. Those are also people who are in the water bleeding, making a lot of noise. That’s an incredible scene in the movie. But the deaths Quint attributes to sharks is more people than have been reliably documented as killed by sharks in the history of the world ever.

Ars Technica: How accurate is Jaws in terms of how and why sharks attack humans? For instance, someone says that people splashing in the water mimics what sharks want to hunt.

David Shiffman: Anyone who tells you they know exactly why a wild animal does or does not do something is someone who you should be a little skeptical of. But a leading theory, which I think makes sense, is this idea of mistaken identity. Some of the people who are most commonly bitten by sharks, though it’s still astronomically rare, are surfers. These are people who are cutting through the water with a silhouette that resembles a seal, wearing black neoprene, which is modeled after seal blubber. Sharks have been patrolling the ocean since before there were trees on land, and it’s only in the last hundred years or so that they’ve had to wonder, is that my preferred prey, or is it a human using technology to mimic my preferred prey for recreational purposes?

If you’ve been in the ocean, there’s been a shark not that far from you, and it knew you were there, and you probably had no idea it was there and had a pleasant day in the water. The sharks that do bite people, they take a little bite and they go, what is that? And swim away. That can be real bad if it hits a major artery or if you’re far from shore. Again, I don’t want to minimize the real harm. But it is not a shark hunting you because it has a taste for human flesh. They don’t have hands. They explore their environment with their mouths and most things in their environment they can eat.

I think Mythbusters tested fish blood versus mammal blood versus chicken blood, I think. And the sharks were attracted to fish blood and had no reaction to the others. So these are animals that are very, very, very well adapted for environmental conditions that in some cases don’t really exist anymore.

Man vs. great white

Brody fights off an increasingly aggressive great white. Universal Pictures

With humans, most of the time, what happens is an immediate bite, and then they swim away. With seals or large prey, they’ll often hit it really hard from below, sometimes knocking it completely out of the water. Or if they’re hunting whales or something that they can’t fit in their mouth, they just take a huge bite and swim away. With fish, they swallow them whole to the extent possible. Sometimes there’s a shaking motion to snap a neck or whatever. You see that with some land predators, too. It’s nothing like what’s seen there—but what an awesome scene.

Ars Technica: What is your favorite scene in Jaws and the one that makes you cringe the most?

David Shiffman: Oh, man. It’s really a great movie, and it holds up well. It was hailed as revolutionary at the time because you hardly ever see the shark. But the reason they did that was because the model of the shark that they built kept breaking. So they decided, let’s just shoot it from the shark’s eye view and save money and annoyance. I love the scene when Hooper realizes that the tiger shark that they’ve caught is obviously not the right species and the reaction that people have to that—just this idea that science and expertise can be used to solve problems. Whenever a shark bites someone, there are people who go out and kill any shark they can find and think that they’re helping.

One of my favorite professional experiences is the American Alasdair Rank Society conference. One year it was in Austin, Texas, near the original Alamo Drafthouse. Coincidentally, while we were there, the cinema held a “Jaws on the Water” event. They had a giant projector screen, and we were sitting in a lake in inner tubes while there were scuba divers in the water messing with us from below. I did that with 75 professional shark scientists. It was absolutely amazing. It helped knowing that it was a lake.

Ars Technica: If you wanted to make another really good shark movie, what would that look like today?

David Shiffman: I often say that there are now three main movie plots: a man goes on a quest, a stranger comes to town, or there’s a shark somewhere you would not expect a shark to be. It depends if you want to make a movie that’s actually good, or one of the more fun “bad” movies like Sharknado or Sharktopus or Avalanche Sharks—the tagline of which is “snow is just frozen water.” These movies are just off the rails and absolutely incredible. The ones that don’t take themselves too seriously and are in on the joke tend to be very fun. But then you get movies like Netflix’s Under Paris (2024); they absolutely thought they were making a good movie and took themselves very seriously, and it was painful to watch.

I would love to see actual science and conservation portrayed. I’d love to see species that are not typically found in these movies featured. The Sharknado series actually did a great job of this because they talked with me and other scientists after the success of the first one. Sharknado II is thanked in my PhD dissertation, because they funded one of my chapters. In that movie, it’s not just great whites and tiger sharks and bull sharks. They have a whale shark that falls out of the sky and hits someone. They have a cookie-cutter shark that falls out of the sky and burrows through someone’s leg. There’s a lot of shark diversity out there, and it’d be nice to get that featured more.

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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Record DDoS pummels site with once-unimaginable 7.3Tbps of junk traffic

Biz & IT, distributed denial of service attack, DOS attack, Security / DJ Henderson / June 21, 2025

Large-scale attacks designed to bring down Internet services by sending them more traffic than they can process keep getting bigger, with the largest one yet, measured at 7.3 terabits per second, being reported Friday by Internet security and performance provider Cloudflare.

The 7.3Tbps attack amounted to 37.4 terabytes of junk traffic that hit the target in just 45 seconds. That’s an almost incomprehensible amount of data, equivalent to more than 9,300 full-length HD movies or 7,500 hours of HD streaming content in well under a minute.

Indiscriminate target bombing

Cloudflare said the attackers “carpet bombed” an average of nearly 22,000 destination ports of a single IP address belonging to the target, identified only as a Cloudflare customer. A total of 34,500 ports were targeted, indicating the thoroughness and well-engineered nature of the attack.

The vast majority of the attack was delivered in the form of User Datagram Protocol packets. Legitimate UDP-based transmissions are used in especially time-sensitive communications, such as those for video playback, gaming applications, and DNS lookups. It speeds up communications by not formally establishing a connection before data is transferred. Unlike the more common Transmission Control Protocol, UDP doesn’t wait for a connection between two computers to be established through a handshake and doesn’t check whether data is properly received by the other party. Instead, it immediately sends data from one machine to another.

UDP flood attacks send extremely high volumes of packets to random or specific ports on the target IP. Such floods can saturate the target’s Internet link or overwhelm internal resources with more packets than they can handle.

Since UDP doesn’t require a handshake, attackers can use it to flood a targeted server with torrents of traffic without first obtaining the server’s permission to begin the transmission. UDP floods typically send large numbers of datagrams to multiple ports on the target system. The target system, in turn, must send an equal number of data packets back to indicate the ports aren’t reachable. Eventually, the target system buckles under the strain, resulting in legitimate traffic being denied.

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Author name: DJ Henderson