DJ Henderson – Page 10

Ars Technica System Guide: Five sample PC builds, from $500 to $5,000

AMD, Ars System Guide, Features, gaming, intel, NVIDIA, Tech / DJ Henderson / August 18, 2025

Despite everything, it’s still possible to build decent PCs for decent prices.

You can buy a great 4K gaming PC for less than it costs to buy a GeForce RTX 5090. Let us show you some examples. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Sometimes I go longer than I intend without writing an updated version of our PC building guide. And while I could just claim to be too busy to spend hours on Newegg or Amazon or other sites digging through dozens of near-identical parts, the lack of updates usually correlates with “times when building a desktop PC is actually a pain in the ass.”

Through most of 2025, fluctuating and inflated graphics card pricing and limited availability have once again conspired to make a normally fun hobby an annoying slog—and honestly kind of a bad way to spend your money, relative to just buying a Steam Deck or something and ignoring your desktop for a while.

But three things have brought me back for another round. First, GPU pricing and availability have improved a little since early 2025. Second, as unreasonable as pricing is for PC parts, pre-built PCs with worse specs and other design compromises are unreasonably priced, too, and people should have some sense of what their options are. And third, I just have the itch—it’s been a while since I built (or helped someone else build) a PC, and I need to get it out of my system.

So here we are! Five different suggestions for builds for a few different budgets and needs, from basic browsing to 4K gaming. And yes, there is a ridiculous “God Box,” despite the fact that the baseline ridiculousness of PC building is higher than it was a few years ago.

Notes on component selection

Part of the fun of building a PC is making it look the way you want. We’ve selected cases that will physically fit the motherboards and other parts we’re recommending and which we think will be good stylistic fits for each system. But there are many cases out there, and our picks aren’t the only options available.

It’s also worth trying to build something that’s a little future-proof—one of the advantages of the PC as a platform is the ability to swap out individual components without needing to throw out the entire system. It’s worth spending a little extra money on something you know will be supported for a while. Right this minute, that gives an advantage to AMD’s socket AM5 ecosystem over slightly cheaper but fading or dead-end platforms like AMD’s socket AM4 and Intel’s LGA 1700 or (according to rumors) LGA 1851.

As for power supplies, we’re looking for 80 Plus certified power supplies from established brands with positive user reviews on retail sites (or positive professional reviews, though these can be somewhat hard to come by for any given PSU these days). If you have a preferred brand, by all means, go with what works for you. The same goes for RAM—we’ll recommend capacities and speeds, and we’ll link to kits from brands that have worked well for us in the past, but that doesn’t mean they’re better than the many other RAM kits with equivalent specs.

For SSDs, we mostly stick to drives from known brands like Samsung, Crucial, Western Digital, and SK hynix. Our builds also include built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so you don’t need to worry about running Ethernet wires and can easily connect to Bluetooth gamepads, keyboards, mice, headsets, and other accessories.

We also haven’t priced in peripherals like webcams, monitors, keyboards, or mice, as we’re assuming most people will reuse what they already have or buy those components separately. If you’re feeling adventurous, you could even make your own DIY keyboard! If you need more guidance, Kimber Streams’ Wirecutter keyboard guides are exhaustive and educational, and Wirecutter has some monitor-buying advice, too.

Finally, we won’t be including the cost of a Windows license in our cost estimates. You can pay many different prices for Windows—$139 for an official retail license from Microsoft, $120 for an “OEM” license for system builders, or anywhere between $15 and $40 for a product key from shady gray market product key resale sites. Windows 10 keys will also work to activate Windows 11, though Microsoft stopped letting old Windows 7 and Windows 8 keys activate new Windows 10 and 11 installs a couple of years ago. You could even install Linux, given recent advancements in game compatibility layers! But if you plan to go that route, know that AMD’s graphics cards tend to be better-supported than Nvidia’s.

The budget all-rounder

What it’s good for: Browsing, schoolwork or regular work, amateur photo or video editing, and very light casual gaming. A low-cost, low-complexity introduction to PC building.

What it sucks at: You’ll need to use low settings at best for modern games, and it’s hard to keep costs down without making big sacrifices.

Cost as of this writing: $479 to $504, depending on your case

The entry point for a basic desktop PC from Dell, HP, and Lenovo is somewhere between $400 and $500 as of this writing. You can beat that pricing with a self-built one if you cut your build to the bone, and you can find tons of cheap used and refurbished stuff and serviceable mini PCs for well under that price, too. But if you’re chasing the thrill of the build, we can definitely match the big OEMs’ pricing while doing better on specs and future-proofing.

The AMD Ryzen 5 8500G should give you all the processing power you need for everyday computing and less-demanding games, despite most of its CPU cores using the lower-performing Zen 4c variant of AMD’s last-gen CPU architecture. The Radeon 740M GPU should do a decent job with many games at lower settings; it’s not a gaming GPU, but it will handle kid-friendly games like Roblox or Minecraft or undemanding battle royale or MOBA games like Fortnite and DOTA 2.

The Gigabyte B650M Gaming Plus WiFi board includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and extra RAM and storage slots for future expandability. Most companies that make AM5 motherboards are pretty good about releasing new BIOS updates that patch vulnerabilities and add support for new CPUs, so you shouldn’t have a problem popping in a new processor a few years down the road if this one is no longer meeting your needs.

An AMD Ryzen 7 8700G. The 8500G is a lower-end relative of this chip, with good-enough CPU and GPU performance for light work. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

This system is spec’d for general usage and exceptionally light gaming, and 16GB of RAM and a 500 GB SSD should be plenty for that kind of thing. You can get the 1TB version of the same SSD for just $20 more, though—not a bad deal if you think light gaming is in the cards. The 600 W power supply is overkill, but it’s just $5 more than the 500 W version of the same PSU, and 600 W is enough headroom to add a GeForce RTX 4060 or 5060-series card or a Radeon RX 9600 XT to the build later on without having to worry.

The biggest challenge when looking for a decent, cheap PC case is finding one without a big, tacky acrylic window. Our standby choice for the last couple of years has been the Thermaltake Versa H17, an understated and reasonably well-reviewed option that doesn’t waste internal space on legacy features like external 3.5 and 5.25-inch drive bays or internal cages for spinning hard drives. But stock seems to be low as of this writing, suggesting it could be unavailable soon.

We looked for some alternatives that wouldn’t be a step down in quality or utility and which wouldn’t drive the system’s total price above $500. YouTubers and users generally seem to like the $70 Phanteks XT Pro, which is a lot bigger than this motherboard needs but is praised for its airflow and flexibility (it has a tempered glass side window in its cheapest configuration, and a solid “silent” variant will run you $88). The Fractal Design Focus 2 is available with both glass and solid side panels for $75.

The budget gaming PC

What it’s good for: Solid all-round performance, plus good 1080p (and sometimes 1440p) gaming performance.

What it sucks at: Future proofing, top-tier CPU performance.

Cost as of this writing: $793 to $828, depending on components

Budget gaming PCs are tough right now, but my broad advice would be the same as it’s always been: Go with the bare minimum everywhere you can so you have more money to spend on the GPU. I went into this totally unsure if I could recommend a PC I’d be happy with for the $700 to $800 we normally hit, and getting close to that number meant making some hard decisions.

I talked myself into a socket AM5 build for our non-gaming budget PC because of its future proof-ness and its decent integrated GPU, but I went with an Intel-based build for this one because we didn’t need the integrated GPU for it and because AMD still mostly uses old socket AM4 chips to cover the $150-and-below part of the market.

Given the choice between aging AMD CPUs and aging Intel CPUs, I have to give Intel the edge, thanks to the Core i5-13400F’s four E-cores. And if a 13th-gen Core chip lacks cutting-edge performance, it’s plenty fast for a midrange GPU. The $109 Core i5-12400F would also be OK and save a little more money, but we think the extra cores and small clock speed boost are worth the $20-ish premium.

For a budget build, we think your best strategy is to save money everywhere you can so you can squeeze a 16GB AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT into the budget. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Going with a DDR4 motherboard and RAM saves us a tiny bit, and we’ve also stayed at 16GB of RAM instead of stepping up (some games, sometimes can benefit from 32GB, especially if you want to keep a bunch of other stuff running in the background, but it still usually won’t be a huge bottleneck). We upgraded to a 1TB SSD; huge AAA games will eat that up relatively quickly, but there is another M.2 slot you can use to put in another drive later. The power supply and case selections are the same as in our budget pick.

All of that cost-cutting was done in service of stretching the budget to include the 16GB version of AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card.

You could go with the 8GB version of the 9060 XT or Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5060 and get solid 1080p gaming performance for almost $100 less. But we’re at a point where having 8GB of RAM in your graphics card can be a bottleneck, and that’s a problem that will only get worse over time. The 9060 XT has a consistent edge over the RTX 5060 in our testing, even in games with ray-tracing effects enabled, and at 1440p, the extra memory can easily be the difference between a game that runs and a game that doesn’t.

A more future-proofed budget gaming PC

What it’s good for: Good all-round performance with plenty of memory and storage, plus room for future upgrades.

What it sucks at: Getting you higher frame rates than our budget-budget build.

Cost as of this writing: $1,070 to $1,110, depending on components

As I found myself making cut after cut to maximize the fps-per-dollar we could get from our budget gaming PC, I decided I wanted to spec out a system with the same GPU but with other components that would make it better for non-gaming use and easier to upgrade in the future, with more generous allotments of memory and storage.

This build shifts back to many of the AMD AM5 components we used in our basic budget build, but with an 8-core Ryzen 7 7700X CPU at its heart. Its Zen 4 architecture isn’t the latest and greatest, but Zen 5 is a modest upgrade, and you’ll still get better single- and multi-core processor performance than you do with the Core i5 in our other build. It’s not worth spending more than $50 to step up to a Ryzen 7 9700X, and it’s overkill to spend $330 on a 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X or $380 on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

This chip doesn’t come with its own fan, so we’ve included an inexpensive air cooler we like that will give you plenty of thermal headroom.

A 32GB kit of RAM and 2TB of storage will give you ample room for games and enough RAM that you won’t have to worry about the small handful of outliers that benefit from more than 16GB of system RAM, while a marginally beefier power supply gives you a bit more headroom for future upgrades while still keeping costs relatively low.

This build won’t benefit your frame rates much since we’re sticking with the same 16GB RX 9060 XT. But the rest of it is specced generously enough that you could add a GeForce RTX 5070 (currently around $550) or a non-XT Radeon RX 9070 card (around $600) without needing to change any of the other components.

A comfortable 4K gaming rig

What it’s good for: Just about anything! But it’s built to play games at higher resolutions than our budget builds.

What it sucks at: Getting you top-of-the-line bragging rights.

Cost as of this writing: $1,829 to $1,934, depending on components.

Our budget builds cover 1080p-to-1440p gaming, and with an RTX 5070 or an RX 9070, they could realistically stretch to 4K in some games. But for more comfortable 4K gaming or super-high-frame-rate 1440p performance, you’ll thank yourself for spending a bit more.

You’ll note that the quality of the component selections here has been bumped up a bit all around. X670 or X870-series boards don’t just get you better I/O; they’ll also get you full PCI Express 5.0 support in the GPU slot and components better-suited to handling faster and more power-hungry components. We’ve swapped to a modular ATX 3.x-compliant power supply to simplify cable management and get a 12V-2×6 power connector. And we picked out a slightly higher-end SSD, too. But we’ve tried not to spend unnecessary money on things that won’t meaningfully improve performance—no 1,000+ watt power supplies, PCIe 5.0 SSDs, or 64GB RAM kits here.

A Ryzen 7 7800X3D might arguably be overkill for this build—especially at 4K, where the GPU will still be the main bottleneck—but it will be useful for getting higher frame rates at lower resolutions and just generally making sure performance stays consistent and smooth. Ryzen 7900X, 7950X, or 9900X chips are all good alternatives if you want more multi-core CPU performance—if you plan to stream as you play, for instance. A 9700X or even a 7700X would probably hold up fine if you won’t be doing that kind of thing and want to save a little.

You could cool any of these with a closed-loop AIO cooler, but a solid air cooler like the Thermalright model will keep it running cool for less money, and with a less-complicated install process.

A GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is the best 4K performance you can get for less than $1,000, but that doesn’t make it cheap. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Based on current pricing and availability, I think the RTX 5070 Ti makes the most sense for a non-absurd 4K-capable build. Its prices are still elevated slightly above its advertised $749 MSRP, but it’s giving you RTX 4080/4080 Super-level performance for between $200 and $400 less than those cards launched for. Nvidia’s next step up, the RTX 5080, will run you at least $1,200 or $1,300—and usually more. AMD’s best option, the RX 9070 XT, is a respectable contender, and it’s probably the better choice if you plan on using Linux instead of Windows. But for a Windows-based gaming box, Nvidia still has an edge in games with ray-tracing effects enabled, plus DLSS upscaling and frame generation.

Is it silly that the GPU costs as much as our entire budget gaming PC? Of course! But it is what it is.

Even more than the budget-focused builds, the case here is a matter of personal preference, and $100 or $150 is enough to buy you any one of several dozen competent cases that will fit our chosen components. We’ve highlighted a few from case makers with good reputations to give you a place to start. Some of these also come in multiple colors, with different side panel options and both RGB and non-RGB options to suit your tastes.

If you like something a little more statement-y, the Fractal Design North ($155) and Lian Li Lancool 217 ($120) both include the wood accents that some case makers have been pushing lately. The Fractal Design case comes with both mesh and tempered glass side panel options, depending on how into RGB you are, while the Lancool case includes a whopping five case fans for keeping your system cool.

The “God Box”

What it’s good for: Anything and everything.

What it sucks at: Being affordable.

Cost as of this writing: $4,891 to $5,146

We’re avoiding Xeon and Threadripper territory here—frankly, I’ve never even tried to do a build centered on those chips and wouldn’t trust myself to make recommendations—but this system is as fast as consumer-grade hardware gets.

An Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 guarantees the fastest GPU performance you can buy and continues the trend of “paying as much for a GPU as you could for an entire fully functional PC.” And while we have specced this build with a single GPU, the motherboard we’ve chosen has a second full-speed PCIe 5.0 x16 slot that you could use for a dual-GPU build.

A Ryzen 9950X3D chip gets you top-tier gaming performance and tons of CPU cores. We’re cooling this powerful chip with a 360 mm Arctic Liquid Freezer III Pro cooler, which has generally earned good reviews from Gamers Nexus and other outlets for its value, cooling performance, and quiet performance. A white option is also available if you’re going for a light-mode color scheme instead of our predominantly dark-mode build.

Other components have been pumped up similarly gratuitously. A 1,000 W power supply is the minimum for an RTX 5090, but to give us some headroom, why not use a 1,200 W model with lights on it? Is PCIe 5.0 storage strictly necessary for anything? No! But let’s grab a 4 TB PCIe 5.0 SSD anyway. And populating all four of our RAM slots with a 32GB stick of DDR5 avoids any unsightly blank spots inside our case.

We’ve selected a couple of largish case options to house our big builds, though as usual, there are tons of other options to fit all design sensibilities and tastes. Just make sure, if you’re selecting a big Extended ATX motherboard like the X870E Taichi, that your case will fit a board that’s slightly wider than a regular ATX or micro ATX board (the Taichi is 267 mm wide, which should be fine in either of our case selections).

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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Rapidly intensifying Hurricane Erin becomes historic storm due to strengthening

erin, hurricanes, rapid intensification, Science / DJ Henderson / August 17, 2025

Erin’s central pressure was in the 990s this time yesterday, and it’s now in the 920’s heading for the teens.

This will make Erin the fastest deepening Atlantic hurricane before Sept 1st. Beating Emily 2005, by a lot.

[image or embed]

— Sam Lillo (@samlillo.bsky.social) August 16, 2025 at 9: 29 AM

With a central pressure of 917 mb on Saturday, Erin ranks as the second-most intense Atlantic in the last 50 years prior to today’s date, behind only Hurricane Allen in 1980.

Rapid intensification becoming more common

Storms like Erin are predicted to become more common due to climate change, scientists say. One study in 2019 found that, for the strongest 5 percent of Atlantic hurricanes, 24-hour intensification rates increased by about 3–4 mph per decade from 1982 to 2009. “Our results suggest a detectable increase of Atlantic intensification rates with a positive contribution from anthropogenic forcing,” the authors of the study, in Nature Communications, wrote.

Hurricane scientists generally agree that although the overall number of tropical storms and hurricanes may not increase in a warmer world, such background conditions are likely to produce more intense storms like Erin.

According to the US government’s Climate.gov website, this increase in intensity of tropical cyclones (TCs) is happening due to human-caused climate change.

“The proportion of severe TCs (Category 4 & 5) has increased, possibly due to anthropogenic climate change,” a coalition of authors wrote. “This proportion of intense TCs is projected to increase further, bringing a greater proportion of storms having more damaging wind speeds, higher storm surges, and more extreme rainfall rates. Most climate model studies project a corresponding reduction in the proportion of low-intensity cyclones, so the total number of TCs each year is projected to decrease or remain approximately the same.”

To date this year the tropical Atlantic has seen lower overall activity than usual. But with Erin’s longevity and intensity this season should soon reach and surpass normal levels of Accumulated Cyclone Energy, a measurement of a season’s total activity. The Atlantic season typically peaks in early September, with the majority of storms forming between early August and early October.

Forecast models indicate the likely development of more hurricanes within the next two weeks, but there is no clear consensus on whether they will impact land.

Rapidly intensifying Hurricane Erin becomes historic storm due to strengthening Read More »

Trump admin ranks companies on loyalty while handing out favors to Big Tech

Policy, trump administration / DJ Henderson / August 16, 2025

We contacted the White House today and will update the story if it provides any comment.

Ending “weaponization”

Public Citizen wrote that “President Donald Trump spent much of his 2024 presidential campaign claiming his prosecution by multiple authorities and subsequent conviction for his crimes are unfair ‘weaponization’ of law enforcement. Corporate executives in the technology sector, eager to curry favor, seized on the talking point. They similarly cast powerful corporations accused of violating laws that protect consumers, workers, investors, and the public as victims of ‘weaponized’ enforcement.”

The Trump administration acted quickly to end this alleged weaponization, Public Citizen wrote:

When Trump took office, the corporate campaign to discredit law enforcement that protects the public and holds the powerful accountable culminated in the day one executive order “Ending Weaponization of the Federal Government,” which explicitly ties enforcement against Trump and January 6 rioters to enforcement against corporate lawbreaking…

Since then, the Trump White House has exerted unprecedented authority over statutorily independent enforcement agencies such as the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and has essentially eliminated the half-century policy of the Justice Department’s independence from the White House.

The elimination of agency independence means enforcement investigations and lawsuits will not proceed if President Trump wants to kill them, and that agency officials who resist White House orders will be removed.

Twenty-three enforcement actions against cryptocurrency corporations and 11 against financial technology firms have been dropped or halted under Trump, the report said. Tech companies that have had investigations stopped include Activision, Binance, Coinbase, eBay, HP, Juniper, Meta, Microsoft, PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla, the report said.

There are still numerous pending investigations and lawsuits against tech companies that the Trump administration hasn’t ended, at least not yet. Companies investigated by the Biden administration and which are now “poised to exploit their ties with the Trump administration include Amazon, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and corporations headed by Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, The Boring Company, and Neuralink),” the report said. Public Citizen also published a spreadsheet containing information on active cases and those that have been ended.

Trump admin ranks companies on loyalty while handing out favors to Big Tech Read More »

Rocket Report: Ariane 6 beats Vulcan to third launch; China’s first drone ship

ariane 6, Arianespace, artemis II, china, human spaceflight, NASA, rocket report, Science, Space, space launch system, spacex, united launch alliance, vulcan / DJ Henderson / August 15, 2025

Why is China’s heavy-lift Long March 5B able to launch only 10 Guowang satellites at a time?

Wearing their orange launch and reentry spacesuits, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman (bottom) and pilot Victor Glover (top) walk out of an emergency egress basket during nighttime training at Launch Complex 39B.

Welcome to Edition 8.06 of the Rocket Report! Two of the world’s most storied rocket builders not named SpaceX achieved major successes this week. Arianespace’s Ariane 6 rocket launched from French Guiana on its third flight Tuesday night with a European weather satellite. Less than 20 minutes later, United Launch Alliance’s third Vulcan rocket lifted off from Florida on a US military mission. These are two of the three big rockets developed in the Western world that have made their orbital debuts in the last two years, alongside Blue Origin’s New Glenn launcher. Ariane 6 narrowly won the “race” to reach its third orbital flight, but if you look at it another way, Ariane 6 reached its third flight milestone 13 months after its inaugural launch. It took Vulcan more than 19 months, and New Glenn has flown just once. SpaceX’s Super Heavy/Starship rocket has flown nine times but has yet to reach orbit.

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.

Sixth success for sea-launched Chinese rocket. Private Chinese satellite operator Geespace added 11 spacecraft to its expanding Internet of Things constellation on August 8, aiming to boost low-power connectivity in key emerging markets, Space News reports. The 11 satellites rode into orbit aboard a solid-fueled Jielong 3 (Smart Dragon 3) rocket lifting off from an ocean platform in the Yellow Sea off the coast of Rizhao, a city in eastern China’s Shandong province. This was the sixth flight of the Jielong 3, a rocket developed by a commercially oriented spinoff of the state-owned China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology.

Mistaken for a meteor … The fourth stage of the Jielong 3 rocket, left in orbit after deploying its 11 satellite payloads, reentered the atmosphere late Sunday night. The fiery and destructive reentry created a fireball that streaked across the skies over Spain, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo reports. Many Spanish residents identified the streaking object as a meteor associated with the Perseid meteor shower. But it turned out to be a piece of China’s Jielong 3 rocket. Any debris that may have survived the scorching reentry likely fell into the Mediterranean Sea.

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Portugal green-lights Azores spaceport. The Portuguese government has granted the Atlantic Spaceport Consortium a license to build and operate a rocket launch facility on the island of Santa Maria in the Azores, European Spaceflight reports. The Atlantic Spaceport Consortium (ASC) was founded in 2019 with the goal of developing a commercial spaceport on Santa Maria, 1,500 kilometers off the Portuguese mainland. In September 2024, the company showcased the island’s suitability as a launch site by launching two small solid-fuel amateur-class rockets that it developed in-house.

What’s on deck? … The spaceport license granted by Portugal’s regulatory authorities does not cover individual launches themselves. Those must be approved in a separate licensing process. It’s likely that the launch site on Santa Maria Island will initially host suborbital launches, including flights by the Polish rocket company SpaceForest. The European Space Agency has also selected Santa Maria as the landing site for the first flight of the Space Rider lifting body vehicle after it launches into orbit, perhaps in 2027. (submitted by claudiodcsilva)

Why is Jeff Bezos buying launches from Elon Musk? Early Monday morning, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from its original launch site in Florida. Remarkably, it was SpaceX’s 100th launch of the year. Perhaps even more notable was the rocket’s payload: two-dozen Project Kuiper satellites, which were dispensed into low-Earth orbit on target, Ars reports. This was SpaceX’s second launch of satellites for Amazon, which is developing a constellation to deliver low-latency broadband Internet around the world. SpaceX, then, just launched a direct competitor to its Starlink network into orbit. And it was for the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who owns a rocket company of his own in Blue Origin.

Several answers … So how did it come to this—Bezos and Elon Musk, competitors in so many ways, working together in space? There are several answers. Most obviously, launching payloads for customers is one of SpaceX’s two core business areas, alongside Starlink. SpaceX sells launch services to all comers and typically offers the lowest price per kilogram to orbit. There’s immediate revenue to be made if a company with deep pockets like Amazon is willing to pay SpaceX. Second, the other options to get Kuiper satellites into orbit just aren’t available at the volume Amazon needs. Amazon has reserved the lion’s share of its Kuiper launches with SpaceX’s competitors: United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Jeff Bezos’ own space company Blue Origin. Lastly, SpaceX could gain some leverage by providing launch services to Amazon. In return for a launch, SpaceX has asked other companies with telecom satellites, such as OneWeb and Kepler Communications, to share spectrum rights to enable Starlink to expand into new markets.

Trump orders cull of commercial launch regulations. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday directing government agencies to “eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for commercial launch and reentry licenses, Ars reports. The FAA, part of the Department of Transportation, is responsible for granting the licenses after ensuring launch and reentries don’t endanger the public, comply with environmental laws, and comport with US national interests. The drive toward deregulation will be welcome news for companies like SpaceX, led by onetime Trump ally Elon Musk; SpaceX conducts nearly all of the commercial launches and reentries licensed by the FAA.

Deflecting scrutiny? … The executive order does several things, and not all of them will be as controversial as the potential elimination of environmental reviews. The order includes a clause directing the government to reevaluate, amend, or rescind a slate of launch-safety regulations written during the first Trump administration. The FAA published the new regulations, known as Part 450, in 2020, and they went into effect in 2021, but space companies have complained that they are too cumbersome and have slowed down the license approval process. The Biden administration established a committee last year to look at reforming the regulations in response to industry’s outcry. Another part of the order that will likely lack bipartisan support is a call for making the head of the FAA’s commercial spaceflight division a political appointee. This job has historically been held by a career civil servant.

Ariane 6 launches European weather satellite. Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket successfully launched for a third time on Tuesday night, carrying a satellite into orbit for weather forecasting and climate monitoring, Euronews reports. “The success of this second commercial launch confirms the performance, reliability, and precision of Ariane 6,” said Martin Sion, CEO of ArianeGroup, operator of the rocket. “Once again, the new European heavy-lift launcher meets Europe’s needs, ensuring sovereign access to space,” Sion added. It marks the second commercial flight of the rocket, which has been in development for almost a decade with the European Space Agency (ESA). It is significant as it gives Europe independent access to space and reduces its reliance on Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Eumetsat returns to Europe … The polar-orbiting weather satellite launched by the Ariane 6 rocket this week is owned by the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, or Eumetsat. Headquartered in Germany, Eumetsat is a multinational organization that owns and operates geostationary and polar-orbiting weather satellites, watching real-time storm development over Europe and Africa, while feeding key data into global weather and climate models. Just last month, Eumetsat’s newest geostationary weather satellite launched from Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket because of delays with the Ariane 6 program.

Rocket Lab isn’t giving up on 2025 yet. Rocket Lab continues to push for a first launch of its medium-lift Neutron rocket before the end of the year, but company executives acknowledge that schedule has no margin for error, Space News reports. It may seem unlikely, but Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, Peter Beck, said in a conference call with investment analysts last week that the company has a “green light” schedule to debut the Neutron rocket within the next four-and-a-half months. There’s still much work to do to prepare for the first launch, and the inaugural flight seems almost certain to slip into 2026.

Launch pad nearly complete … Rocket Lab plans to host a ribbon-cutting at the Neutron rocket’s new launch pad on Wallops Island, Virginia, on August 28. This launch pad is located just south of the spaceport’s largest existing launch facility, where Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket lifts off on resupply missions to the International Space Station. Rocket Lab has a small launch pad for its light-class Electron launcher co-located with the Antares pad at Wallops.

Chinese company reveals drone ship. The Chinese launch company iSpace has released the first photos of an ocean-going recovery ship to support the landings of reusable first-stage boosters. The company hosted a dedication ceremony in Yangzhou, China, earlier this month for the vessel, which looks similar to SpaceX’s rocket landing drone ships. In a press release, iSpace said the ship, named “Interstellar Return,” is China’s first marine rocket recovery ship, and the fifth such vessel in the world. SpaceX has three drone ships in its fleet for the Falcon 9 rocket, and Blue Origin has one for the New Glenn booster.

Rocket agnostic … The recovery ship will be compatible with various medium- and large-sized reusable rockets, iSpace said. But its main use will be as the landing site for the first stage booster for iSpace’s own Hyperbola 3 rocket, a medium-lift launcher with methane-fueled engines. The company has completed multiple vertical takeoff and landing tests of prototype boosters for the Hyperbola 3. The recovery ship measures about 100 meters long and 42 meters wide, with a displacement of 17,000 metric tons, and it has the ability to perform “intelligent unmanned operations” thanks to a dynamic positioning system, according to iSpace.

Vulcan’s first national security launch. United Launch Alliance delivered multiple US military satellites into a high-altitude orbit after a prime-time launch Tuesday night, marking an important transition from development to operations for the company’s new Vulcan rocket, Ars reports. This mission, officially designated USSF-106 by the US Space Force, was the first flight of ULA’s Vulcan rocket to carry national security payloads. Two test flights of the Vulcan rocket last year gave military officials enough confidence to certify it for launching the Pentagon’s medium-to-large space missions.

Secrecy in the fairing … The Vulcan rocket’s Centaur upper stage released its payloads into geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator roughly seven hours after liftoff. One of the satellites deployed by the Vulcan rocket is an experimental navigation testbed named NTS-3. It will demonstrate new technologies that could be used on future GPS navigation satellites. But the Space Force declined to disclose any information about the mission’s other payloads.

Artemis II crew trains for nighttime ops. The four astronauts training to fly around the Moon on NASA’s Artemis II mission next year have been at Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week. One of the reasons they were at Kennedy was to run through a rehearsal for what it will be like to work at the launch pad if the Artemis II mission ends up lifting off at night. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen put on their spacesuits and rehearsed emergency procedures at Launch Complex 39B, replicating a daytime simulation they participated in last year.

Moving forward … The astronauts also went inside the Vehicle Assembly Building to practice using egress baskets they would use to quickly escape the launch pad in the event of a prelaunch emergency. The baskets are fastened to the mobile launch tower inside the VAB, where technicians are assembling and testing the Space Launch System rocket for the Artemis II mission. Later this year, the astronauts will return to Kennedy for a two-part countdown demonstration test. First, the crew members will board their Orion spacecraft once it’s stacked atop the SLS rocket inside the VAB. Then, in part two, the astronauts will again rehearse emergency evacuation procedures once the rocket rolls to the launch pad.

China’s Long March 5B flies again. China is ramping up construction of its national satellite-Internet megaconstellation with the successful deployment of another batch of Guowang satellites by a heavy-lift Long March 5B rocket on Wednesday, Space.com reports. Guowang, whose name translates as “national network,” will be operated by China SatNet, a state-run company established in 2021. The constellation will eventually consist of about 13,000 satellites if all goes to plan.

Make this make sense … Guowang is a long way from that goal. Wednesday’s launch was the eighth overall for the network, but it was the fourth for the project in less than three weeks. Each mission lofts just five to 10 Guowang spacecraft, apparently because each satellite is quite large. For comparison, SpaceX launches 24 to 28 satellites on each mission to assemble its Starlink broadband megaconstellation, which currently consists of nearly 8,100 operational spacecraft. The Long March 5B is China’s most powerful operational rocket, with a lift capacity somewhat higher than SpaceX’s Falcon 9 but below that of the Falcon Heavy. It begs the question of just how big the Guowang satellites really are, and do they have a purpose beyond broadband Internet service?

Next three launches

Aug. 16: Kinetica 1 | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 07: 35 UTC

Aug. 17: Long March 4C | Unknown Payload | Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China | 09: 05 UTC

Aug. 17: Long March 6A | Unknown Payload | Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China | 14: 15 UTC

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.

Rocket Report: Ariane 6 beats Vulcan to third launch; China’s first drone ship Read More »

Dedicated volunteer exposes “single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia’s history”

culture, David woodard, wikipedia / DJ Henderson / August 15, 2025

After a reduction in activity, things ramped up again in 2021, as IP addresses from around the world started creating Woodard references and articles once more. For instance, “addresses from Canada, Germany, Indonesia, the UK and other places added some trivia about Woodard to all 15 Wikipedia articles about the calea ternifolia.”

Then things got “more sophisticated.” From December 2021 through June 2025, 183 articles were created about Woodard, each in a different language’s Wikipedia and each by a unique account. These accounts followed a pattern of behavior: They were “created, often with a fairly generic name, and made a user page with a single image on it. They then made dozens of minor edits to unrelated articles, before creating an article about David Woodard, then making a dozen or so more minor edits before disappearing off the platform.”

Grnrchst believes that all the activity was meant to “create as many articles about Woodard as possible, and to spread photos of and information on Woodard to as many articles as possible, while hiding that activity as much as possible… I came to believe that David Woodard himself, or someone close to him, had been operating this network of accounts and IP addresses for the purposes of cynical self-promotion.”

After the Grnrchst report, Wikipedia’s global stewards removed 235 articles on Woodard from Wikipedia instances with few users or administrators. Larger Wikipedias were free to make their own community decisions, and they removed another 80 articles and banned numerous accounts.

“A full decade of dedicated self-promotion by an individual network has been undone in only a few weeks by our community,” Grnrchst noted.

In the end, just 20 articles about Woodard remain, such as this one in English, which does not mention the controversy.

We were unable to get in touch with Woodard, whose personal website is password-protected and only available “by invitation.”

Could the whole thing be some kind of “art project,” with the real payoff being exposure and being written about? Perhaps. But whatever the motive behind the decade-long effort to boost Woodard on Wikipedia, the incident reminds us just how much effort some people are willing to put into polluting open or public-facing projects for their own ends.

Dedicated volunteer exposes “single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia’s history” Read More »

Incan numerical recordkeeping system may have been widely used

ancient people did stuff, anthropology, Archaeology, inca, Incan empire, indigenous americans, indigenous communities, indigenous south america, khipu, Pre-Columbian civilizations, Science, wari / DJ Henderson / August 14, 2025

Women in STEM: Inca Edition

In the late 1500s, a few decades after the khipu in this recent study was made, an Indigenous chronicler named Guaman Poma de Ayala described how older women used khipu to “keep track of everything” in aqllawasai: places that basically functioned as finishing schools for Inca girls. Teenage girls, chosen by local nobles, were sent away to live in seclusion at the aqllawasai to weave cloth, brew chicha, and prepare food for ritual feasts.

What happened to the girls after aqllawasai graduation was a mixed bag. Some of them were married (or given as concubines) to Inca nobles, others became priestesses, and some ended up as human sacrifices. But some of them actually got to go home again, and they probably took their knowledge of khipu with them.

“I think this is the likely way in which khipu literacy made it into the countryside and the villages,” said Hyland. “These women, who were not necessarily elite, taught it to their children, etc.” That may be where the maker of KH0631 learned their skills: either in an aqllawasai or from a graduate of one (we still don’t know this particular khipu-maker’s gender).

“Science confirming what they already knew”

The finely crafted khipu turning out to be the work of a commoner shows that numeracy was widespread and surprisingly egalitarian in the Inca empire, but it also reveals a centuries-long thread connecting the Inca and their descendants.

Modern people—the descendants of the Inca—still use khipu today in some parts of Peru and Chile. Some scholars (mostly non-Indigenous ones) have argued that these modern khipu weren’t really based on knowledge passed down for centuries but were instead just a clumsy attempt to copy the Inca technology. But if commoners were using khipu in the Inca empire, it makes sense for that knowledge to have been passed down to modern villagers.

“It points to a continuity between Inka and modern khipus,” said Hyland. “In the few modern villages with living khipu traditions, they already believe in this continuity, so it would be the case of science confirming what they already know.”

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adv1950 (About DOIs).

Incan numerical recordkeeping system may have been widely used Read More »

Misunderstood “photophoresis” effect could loft metal sheets to exosphere

engineering, materials science, photophoresis, Physics, Science / DJ Henderson / August 14, 2025

Photophoresis can generate a tiny bit of lift without any moving parts.

Image of a wooden stand holding a sealed glass bulb with a spinning set of vanes, each of which has a lit and dark side.

Most people would recognize the device in the image above, although they probably wouldn’t know it by its formal name: the Crookes radiometer. As its name implies, placing the radiometer in light produces a measurable change: the blades start spinning.

Unfortunately, many people misunderstand the physics of its operation (which we’ll return to shortly). The actual forces that drive the blades to spin, called photophoresis, can act on a variety of structures as long as they’re placed in a sufficiently low-density atmosphere. Now, a team of researchers has figured out that it may be possible to use the photophoretic effect to loft thin sheets of metal into the upper atmosphere of Earth and other planets. While their idea is to use it to send probes to the portion of the atmosphere that’s too high for balloons and too low for satellites, they have tested some working prototypes a bit closer to the Earth’s surface.

Photophoresis

It’s quite common—and quite wrong—to see explanations of the Crookes radiometer that involve radiation pressure. Supposedly, the dark sides of the blades absorb more photons, each of which carries a tiny bit of momentum, giving the dark side of the blades a consistent push. The problem with this explanation is that photons are bouncing off the silvery side, which imparts even more momentum. If the device were spinning due to radiation pressure, it would be turning in the opposite direction than it actually does.

An excess of the absorbed photons on the dark side is key to understanding how it works, though. Photophoresis operates through the temperature difference that develops between the warm, light-absorbing dark side of the blade and the cooler silvered side.

Any gas molecule that bumps into the dark side will likely pick up some of the excess thermal energy from it and move away from the blade faster than it arrived. At the sorts of atmospheric pressures we normally experience, these molecules don’t get very far before they bump into other gas molecules, which keeps any significant differences from developing.

But a Crookes radiometer is in a sealed glass container with a far lower air pressure. This allows the gas molecules to speed off much farther from the dark surface of the blade before they run into anything, creating an area of somewhat lower pressure at its surface. That causes gas near the surface of the shiny side to rush around and fill this lower-pressure area, imparting the force that starts the blades turning.

It’s pretty impressively inefficient in that sort of configuration, though. So people have spent a lot of time trying to design alternative configurations that can generate a bit more force. One idea with a lot of research traction is a setup that involves two thin metal sheets—one light, one dark—arranged parallel to each other. Both sheets would be heavily perforated to cut down on weight. And a subset of them would have a short pipe connecting holes on the top and bottom sheet. (This has picked up the nickname “nanocardboard.”)

These pipes would serve several purposes. One is to simply link the two sheets into a single unit. Another is to act as an insulator, keeping heat from moving from the dark sheet to the light one, and thus enhancing the temperature gradient. Finally, they provide a direct path for air to move from the top of the light-colored sheet to the bottom of the dark one, giving a bit of directed thrust to help keep the sheets aloft.

Optimization

As you might imagine, there are a lot of free parameters you can tweak: the size of the gap between the sheets, the density of perforations in them, the number of those holes that are connected by a pipe, and so on. So a small team of researchers developed a system to model different configurations and attempt to optimize for lift. (We’ll get to their motivations for doing so a bit later.)

Starting with a disk of nanocardboard, “The inputs to the model are the geometric, optical and thermal properties of the disk, ambient gas conditions, and external radiative heat fluxes on the disk,” as the researchers describe it. “The outputs are the conductive heat fluxes on the two membranes, the membrane temperatures, and the net photophoretic lofting force on the structure.” In general, the ambient gas conditions needed to generate lift are similar to the ones inside the Crookes radiometer: well below the air pressure at sea level.

The model suggested that three trends should influence any final designs. The first is that the density of perforations is a balance. At relatively low elevations (meaning a denser atmosphere), many perforations increase the stress on large sheets, but they decrease the stress for small items at high elevations. The other thing is that, rather than increasing with surface area, lift tends to drop because the sheets are more likely to equilibrate to the prevailing temperatures. A square millimeter of nanocardboard produces over 10 times more lift per surface area than a 10-square-centimeter piece of the same material.

Finally, the researchers calculate that the lift is at its maximum in the mesosphere, the area just above the stratosphere (50–100 kilometers above Earth’s surface).

Light and lifting

The researchers then built a few sheets of nanocardboard to test the output of their model. The actual products, primarily made of chromium, aluminum, and aluminum oxide, were incredibly light, weighing only a gram for a square meter of material. When illuminated by a laser or white LED, they generated measurable force on a testing device, provided the atmosphere was kept sufficiently sparse. With an exposure equivalent to sunlight, the device generated more than it weighed.

It’s a really nice demonstration that we can take a relatively obscure and weak physical effect and design devices that can levitate in the upper atmosphere, powered by nothing more than sunlight—which is pretty cool.

But the researchers have a goal beyond that. The mesophere turns out to be a really difficult part of the atmosphere to study. It’s not dense enough to support balloons or aircraft, but it still has enough gas to make quick work of any satellites. So the researchers really want to turn one of these devices into an instrument-carrying aircraft. Unfortunately, that would mean adding the structural components needed to hold instruments, along with the instruments themselves. And even in the mesosphere, where lift is optimal, these things do not generate much in the way of lift.

Plus, there’s the issue of getting them there, given that they won’t generate enough lift in the lower atmosphere, so they’ll have to be carried into the upper stratosphere by something else and then be released gently enough to not damage their fragile structure. And then, unless you’re lofting them during the polar summer, they will likely come floating back down at night.

None of this is to say this is an impossible dream. But there are definitely a lot of very large hurdles between the work and practical applications on Earth—much less on Mars, where the authors suggest the system could also be used to explore the mesosphere. But even if that doesn’t end up being realistic, this is still a pretty neat bit of physics.

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

Misunderstood “photophoresis” effect could loft metal sheets to exosphere Read More »

Trump orders cull of regulations governing commercial rocket launches

Commercial space, Donald Trump, executive order, FAA, launch, Science, Space, space policy, spacex, White House / DJ Henderson / August 14, 2025

The head of the FAA’s commercial spaceflight division will become a political appointee.

Birds take flight at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in this 2010 photo. Credit: NASA

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday directing government agencies to “eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for commercial launch and reentry licenses.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), part of the Department of Transportation (DOT), grants licenses for commercial launch and reentry operations. The FAA is charged with ensuring launch and reentries comply with environmental laws, comport with US national interests, and don’t endanger the public.

The drive toward deregulation will be welcome news for companies like SpaceX, led by onetime Trump ally Elon Musk; SpaceX conducts nearly all of the commercial launches and reentries licensed by the FAA.

Deregulation time

Trump ordered Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who also serves as the acting administrator of NASA, to “use all available authorities to eliminate or expedite… environmental reviews for… launch and reentry licenses and permits.” In the order signed by Trump, White House officials wrote that Duffy should consult with the chair of the Council on Environmental Quality and follow “applicable law” in the regulatory cull.

The executive order also includes a clause directing Duffy to reevaluate, amend, or rescind a slate of launch-safety regulations written during the first Trump administration. The FAA published the new regulations, known as Part 450, in 2020, and they went into effect in 2021, but space companies have complained they are too cumbersome and have slowed down the license approval process.

And there’s more. Trump ordered NASA, the military, and DOT to eliminate duplicative reviews for spaceport development. This is particularly pertinent at federally owned launch ranges like those at Cape Canaveral, Florida; Vandenberg Space Force Base, California; and Wallops Island, Virginia.

The Trump administration also plans to make the head of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation a political appointee. This office oversees commercial launch and reentry licensing and was previously led by a career civil servant. Duffy will also hire an advisor on deregulation in the commercial spaceflight industry to join DOT, and the Office of Space Commerce will be elevated to a more prominent position within the Commerce Department.

“It is the policy of the United States to enhance American greatness in space by enabling a competitive launch marketplace and substantially increasing commercial space launch cadence and novel space activities by 2030,” Trump’s executive order reads. “To accomplish this, the federal government will streamline commercial license and permit approvals for United States-based operators.”

News of the executive order was reported last month by ProPublica, which wrote that the Trump administration was circulating draft language among federal agencies to slash rules to protect the environment and the public from the dangers of rocket launches. The executive order signed by Trump and released by the White House on Wednesday confirms ProPublica’s reporting.

Jared Margolis, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, criticized the Trump administration’s move.

“This reckless order puts people and wildlife at risk from private companies launching giant rockets that often explode and wreak devastation on surrounding areas,” Margolis said in a statement. “Bending the knee to powerful corporations by allowing federal agencies to ignore bedrock environmental laws is incredibly dangerous and puts all of us in harm’s way. This is clearly not in the public interest.”

Duffy, the first person to lead NASA and another federal department at the same time, argued the order is important to sustain economic growth in the space industry.

“By slashing red tape tying up spaceport construction, streamlining launch licenses so they can occur at scale, and creating high-level space positions in government, we can unleash the next wave of innovation,” Duffy said in a statement. “At NASA, this means continuing to work with commercial space companies and improving our spaceports’ ability to launch.”

Nipping NEPA

The executive order is emblematic of the Trump administration’s broader push to curtail environmental reviews for large infrastructure projects.

The White House has already directed federal agencies to repeal regulations enforcing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a 1969 law that requires the feds prepare environmental assessments and environmental impact statements to evaluate the effects of government actions—such as licensing approvals—on the environment.

Regarding commercial spaceflight, the White House ordered the Transportation Department to create a list of activities officials there believe are not subject to NEPA and establish exclusions under NEPA for launch and reentry licenses.

Onlookers watch from nearby sand dunes as SpaceX prepares a Starship rocket for launch from Starbase, Texas. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

The changes to the environmental review process might be the most controversial part of Trump’s new executive order. Another section of the order—the attempt to reform or rescind the so-called Part 450 launch and reentry regulations—appears to have bipartisan support in Congress.

The FAA started implementing its new Part 450 commercial launch and reentry regulations less than five years ago after writing the rules in response to another Trump executive order signed in 2018. Part 450 was intended to streamline the launch approval process by allowing companies to submit applications for a series of launches or reentries, rather than requiring a new license for each mission.

But industry officials quickly criticized the new regulations, which they said didn’t account for rapid iteration of rockets and spacecraft like SpaceX’s enormous Starship/Super Heavy launch vehicle. The FAA approved a SpaceX request in May to increase the number of approved Starship launches from five to 25 per year from the company’s base in Starship, Texas, near the US-Mexico border.

Last year, the FAA’s leadership under the Biden administration established a committee to examine the shortcomings of Part 450. The Republican and Democratic leaders of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee submitted a joint request in February for the Government Accountability Office to conduct an independent review of the FAA’s Part 450 regulations.

“Reforming and streamlining commercial launch regulations and licensing is an area the Biden administration knew needed reform,” wrote Laura Forczyk, founder and executive director of the space consulting firm Astralytical, in a post on X. “However, little was done. Will more be done with this executive order? I hope so. This was needed years ago.”

Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, applauded the Trump administration’s regulatory policy.

“This executive order will strengthen and grow the US commercial space industry by cutting red tape while maintaining a commitment to public safety, benefitting the American people and the US government that are increasingly reliant on space for our national and economic security,” Cavossa said in a statement.

Specific language in the new Trump executive order calls for the FAA to evaluate which regulations should be waived for hybrid launch or reentry vehicles that hold FAA airworthiness certificates, and which requirements should be remitted for rockets with a flight termination system, an explosive charge designed to destroy a launch vehicle if it veers off its pre-approved course after liftoff. These are similar to the topics the Biden-era FAA was looking at last year.

The new Trump administration policy also seeks to limit the authority of state officials in enforcing their own environmental rules related to the construction or operation of spaceports.

This is especially relevant after the California Coastal Commission rejected a proposal by SpaceX to double its launch cadence at Vandenberg Space Force Base, a spaceport located roughly 140 miles (225 kilometers) northwest of Los Angeles. The Space Force, which owns Vandenberg and is one of SpaceX’s primary customers, backs SpaceX’s push for more launches.

Finally, the order gives the Department of Commerce responsibility for authorizing “novel space activities” such as in-space assembly and manufacturing, asteroid and planetary mining, and missions to remove space debris from orbit.

This story was updated at 12: 30 am EDT on August 14 with statements from the Center for Biological Diversity and the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.

Trump orders cull of regulations governing commercial rocket launches Read More »

OpenAI brings back GPT-4o after user revolt

AI, AI assistants, AI behavior, AI model deprecation, AI personality, Biz & IT, chatbots, GPT-4o, GPT-5, large language models, machine learning, openai, sam altman / DJ Henderson / August 13, 2025

On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that GPT-4o has returned to ChatGPT following intense user backlash over its removal during last week’s GPT-5 launch. The AI model now appears in the model picker for all paid ChatGPT users by default (including ChatGPT Plus accounts), marking a swift reversal after thousands of users complained about losing access to their preferred models.

The return of GPT-4o comes after what Altman described as OpenAI underestimating “how much some of the things that people like in GPT-4o matter to them.” In an attempt to simplify its offerings, OpenAI had initially removed all previous AI models from ChatGPT when GPT-5 launched on August 7, forcing users to adopt the new model without warning. The move sparked one of the most vocal user revolts in ChatGPT’s history, with a Reddit thread titled “GPT-5 is horrible” gathering over 2,000 comments within days.

Along with bringing back GPT-4o, OpenAI made several other changes to address user concerns. Rate limits for GPT-5 Thinking mode increased from 200 to 3,000 messages per week, with additional capacity available through “GPT-5 Thinking mini” after reaching that limit. The company also added new routing options—”Auto,” “Fast,” and “Thinking”—giving users more control over which GPT-5 variant handles their queries.

A screenshot of ChatGPT Pro's model picker interface captured on August 13, 2025. — A screenshot of ChatGPT Pro’s model picker interface captured on August 13, 2025. Credit: Benj Edwards

For Pro users who pay $200 a month for access, Altman confirmed that additional models, including o3, 4.1, and GPT-5 Thinking mini, will later become available through a “Show additional models” toggle in ChatGPT web settings. He noted that GPT-4.5 will remain exclusive to Pro subscribers due to high GPU costs.

OpenAI brings back GPT-4o after user revolt Read More »

Mercedes-Benz Vision V Concept: Is this the solution or a sideshow?

Cars, concept car, Mercedes-Benz / DJ Henderson / August 13, 2025

An orange tint of smoke in the air always contributes to dramatic lighting for sunrise photos in Los Angeles. But this early in the fire season, the coloring serves as an inescapable reminder of greenhouse gas emissions and the mobility solutions that might reduce or at least slightly mitigate the future of radical weather crises. It’s fitting, then, that a massive 75,000-acre fire burns in Santa Maria, in addition to a small brush fire on the 110 freeway less than a mile away as I visit the Elysian Park Helipad overlooking Dodger Stadium to check out Mercedes-Benz’s new Vision V concept van ahead of its American debut at Monterey Car Week.

The Vision V certainly looks like a concept car, with futuristic and swooping lines that somehow manage to make an otherwise utilitarian van shape at least somewhat stylish. Over 800 tiny light louvers spread across the grille and headlight bar at the front and the taillights at the rear, where a microscopic spoiler matches a chrome lower diffuser.

As usual with these design exercises, the Vision V sports huge wheels and low-profile tires, but a Benz rep on hand claimed that the final production design will strongly resemble this concept form. On a wheelbase of 139 inches (3,530 mm), the van measures 18 feet long by 82.7 inches wide and 74.5 inches tall (5,486×2,100×1,892 mm). Most of those dimensions will change by only fractions of inches, other than the height, which will grow about 3–4 inches taller (76–101 mm).

Expect the production Mercedes van to look quite a lot like this. Michael Teo Van Runkle

Still, expect short overhangs and big wheels, even if not quite the size of these absurdly chrome 24-inchers. Mercedes also confirmed vague powertrain details, including front-wheel drive and 4Matic variants—presumably single and dual-motor, though my question about a tri- or quad-motor à la the electric G-Wagen received a firm “no comment” in response. Similarly, no word on battery capacity other than a range target of 300 miles.

Mercedes-Benz Vision V Concept: Is this the solution or a sideshow? Read More »

High-severity WinRAR 0-day exploited for weeks by 2 groups

0-Day, Biz & IT, ESET, Security, winrar, zero-day vulnerability / DJ Henderson / August 12, 2025

A high-severity zero-day in the widely used WinRAR file compressor is under active exploitation by two Russian cybercrime groups. The attacks backdoor computers that open malicious archives attached to phishing messages, some of which are personalized.

Security firm ESET said Monday that it first detected the attacks on July 18, when its telemetry spotted a file in an unusual directory path. By July 24, ESET determined that the behavior was linked to the exploitation of an unknown vulnerability in WinRAR, a utility for compressing files, and has an installed base of about 500 million. ESET notified WinRAR developers the same day, and a fix was released six days later.

Serious effort and resources

The vulnerability seemed to have super Windows powers. It abused alternate data streams, a Windows feature that allows different ways of representing the same file path. The exploit abused that feature to trigger a previously unknown path traversal flaw that caused WinRAR to plant malicious executables in attacker-chosen file paths %TEMP% and %LOCALAPPDATA%, which Windows normally makes off-limits because of their ability to execute code.

ESET said it has determined that the attacks came from RomCom, its tracking designation for a financially motivated crime group operating out of Russia. The well-resourced group has been active for years in attacks that showcase its ability to procure exploits and execute fairly sophisticated tradecraft. The zero-day the group used is now being tracked as CVE-2025-8088.

“By exploiting a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in WinRAR, the RomCom group has shown that it is willing to invest serious effort and resources into its cyberoperations,” ESET’s Anton Cherepanov, Peter Strýček, and Damien Schaeffer wrote. “This is at least the third time RomCom has used a zero-day vulnerability in the wild, highlighting its ongoing focus on acquiring and using exploits for targeted attacks.”

Oddly, RomCom wasn’t the only group exploiting CVE-2025-8088. According to Russian security firm Bi.ZONE, the same vulnerability was being actively exploited by a group it tracks as Paper Werewolf. Also tracked as GOFFEE, the group was also exploiting CVE-2025-6218, a separate high-severity WinRAR vulnerability that received a fix five weeks before CVE-2025-8088 was patched.

High-severity WinRAR 0-day exploited for weeks by 2 groups Read More »

Boar’s Head to reopen plant as mold and funky meat problems pop up elsewhere

boar's head, deli meat, food-borne diseases, health, listeria, outbreak, sanitation / DJ Henderson / August 12, 2025

Boar’s Head plans to reopen the Jarratt, Virginia, facility at the center of a deadly Listeria outbreak last year despite federal inspections continuing to find sanitation violations at three of the food company’s other facilities, according to federal records obtained by The Associated Press.

The AP obtained 35 pages of inspection reports via a Freedom of Information Act Request. Those reports cover inspections between January 1 and July 23 at three other Boar’s Head facilities: Forrest City, Arkansas; New Castle, Indiana; and Petersburg, Virginia. Overall, the reports reveal a suite of violations, including mold, condensation dripping over food areas, overflowing trash, meat and fat residue built up on walls and equipment, drains blocked with meat scraps, and pooling meat juice. The reports also recorded staff who didn’t wear the proper protective hairnets and aprons—and didn’t wash their hands.

In one violation, reported in the Petersburg facility, inspectors found meat waste collecting under equipment, including “5-6 hams, 4 large pieces of meat and a large quantity of pooling meat juice.”

The problems echo the sanitation violations recorded at the Jarratt plant before contamination with Listeria—particularly linked to the company’s liverwurst—caused an outbreak that led officials to shut it down. That outbreak spanned July to November of last year and sickened 61 people across 19 states, hospitalizing 60 and killing 10. Inspection reports revealed problems with mold, water leaks, dirty equipment and rooms, meat debris stuck on walls and equipment, various bugs, and, at one point, puddles of blood on the floor.

Amid the outbreak response, Boar’s Head vowed to make big changes to improve its food safety systems. Those included setting up a panel of food safety advisers, which included Frank Yiannas, a former Food and Drug Administration official, and Mindy Brashears, who served as the US Department of Agriculture undersecretary for food safety during Trump’s first term and has been nominated for the position again in Trump’s second.

Boar’s Head to reopen plant as mold and funky meat problems pop up elsewhere Read More »

Author name: DJ Henderson