Beth Washington – Page 16

Encryption made for police and military radios may be easily cracked

Biz & IT, e2ee, ETSI, Security, syndication, TETRA / Beth Washington / August 9, 2025

An encryption algorithm can have weaknesses that could allow an attacker to listen in.

Two years ago, researchers in the Netherlands discovered an intentional backdoor in an encryption algorithm baked into radios used by critical infrastructure–as well as police, intelligence agencies, and military forces around the world–that made any communication secured with the algorithm vulnerable to eavesdropping.

When the researchers publicly disclosed the issue in 2023, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), which developed the algorithm, advised anyone using it for sensitive communication to deploy an end-to-end encryption solution on top of the flawed algorithm to bolster the security of their communications.

But now the same researchers have found that at least one implementation of the end-to-end encryption solution endorsed by ETSI has a similar issue that makes it equally vulnerable to eavesdropping. The encryption algorithm used for the device they examined starts with a 128-bit key, but this gets compressed to 56 bits before it encrypts traffic, making it easier to crack. It’s not clear who is using this implementation of the end-to-end encryption algorithm, nor if anyone using devices with the end-to-end encryption is aware of the security vulnerability in them.

The end-to-end encryption the researchers examined, which is expensive to deploy, is most commonly used in radios for law enforcement agencies, special forces, and covert military and intelligence teams that are involved in national security work and therefore need an extra layer of security. But ETSI’s endorsement of the algorithm two years ago to mitigate flaws found in its lower-level encryption algorithm suggests it may be used more widely now than at the time.

In 2023, Carlo Meijer, Wouter Bokslag, and Jos Wetzels of security firm Midnight Blue, based in the Netherlands, discovered vulnerabilities in encryption algorithms that are part of a European radio standard created by ETSI called TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which has been baked into radio systems made by Motorola, Damm, Sepura, and others since the ’90s. The flaws remained unknown publicly until their disclosure, because ETSI refused for decades to let anyone examine the proprietary algorithms. The end-to-end encryption the researchers examined recently is designed to run on top of TETRA encryption algorithms.

The researchers found the issue with the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) only after extracting and reverse-engineering the E2EE algorithm used in a radio made by Sepura. The researchers plan to present their findings today at the BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas.

ETSI, when contacted about the issue, noted that the end-to-end encryption used with TETRA-based radios is not part of the ETSI standard, nor was it created by the organization. Instead it was produced by The Critical Communications Association’s (TCCA) security and fraud prevention group (SFPG). But ETSI and TCCA work closely with one another, and the two organizations include many of the same people. Brian Murgatroyd, former chair of the technical body at ETSI responsible for the TETRA standard as well as the TCCA group that developed the E2EE solution, wrote in an email on behalf of ETSI and the TCCA that end-to-end encryption was not included in the ETSI standard “because at the time it was considered that E2EE would only be used by government groups where national security concerns were involved, and these groups often have special security needs.

For this reason, Murgatroyd noted that purchasers of TETRA-based radios are free to deploy other solutions for end-to-end encryption on their radios, but he acknowledges that the one produced by the TCCA and endorsed by ETSI “is widely used as far as we can tell.”

Although TETRA-based radio devices are not used by police and military in the US, the majority of police forces around the world do use them. These include police forces in Belgium and Scandinavian countries, as well as Eastern European countries like Serbia, Moldova, Bulgaria, and Macedonia, and in the Middle East in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. The Ministries of Defense in Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, and Syria also use them, as do the Polish military counterintelligence agency, the Finnish defense forces, and Lebanon and Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services. It’s not clear, however, how many of these also deploy end-to-end decryption with their radios.

The TETRA standard includes four encryption algorithms—TEA1, TEA2, TEA3 and TEA4—that can be used by radio manufacturers in different products, depending on the intended customer and usage. The algorithms have different levels of security based on whether the radios will be sold in or outside Europe. TEA2, for example, is restricted for use in radios used by police, emergency services, military, and intelligence agencies in Europe. TEA3 is available for police and emergency services radios used outside Europe but only in countries deemed “friendly” to the EU. Only TEA1 is available for radios used by public safety agencies, police agencies, and militaries in countries deemed not friendly to Europe, such as Iran. But it’s also used in critical infrastructure in the US and other countries for machine-to-machine communication in industrial control settings such as pipelines, railways, and electric grids.

All four TETRA encryption algorithms use 80-bit keys to secure communication. But the Dutch researchers revealed in 2023 that TEA1 has a feature that causes its key to get reduced to just 32 bits, which allowed the researchers to crack it in less than a minute.

In the case of the E2EE, the researchers found that the implementation they examined starts with a key that is more secure than ones used in the TETRA algorithms, but it gets reduced to 56 bits, which would potentially let someone decrypt voice and data communications. They also found a second vulnerability that would let someone send fraudulent messages or replay legitimate ones to spread misinformation or confusion to personnel using the radios.

The ability to inject voice traffic and replay messages affects all users of the TCCA end-to-end encryption scheme, according to the researchers. They say this is the result of flaws in the TCCA E2EE protocol design rather than a particular implementation. They also say that “law enforcement end users” have confirmed to them that this flaw is in radios produced by vendors other than Sepura.

But the researchers say only a subset of end-to-end encryption users are likely affected by the reduced-key vulnerability because it depends on how the encryption was implemented in radios sold to various countries.

ETSI’s Murgatroyd said in 2023 that the TEA1 key was reduced to meet export controls for encryption sold to customers outside Europe. He said when the algorithm was created, a key with 32 bits of entropy was considered secure for most uses. Advances in computing power make it less secure now, so when the Dutch researchers exposed the reduced key two years ago, ETSI recommended that customers using TEA1 deploy TCCA’s end-to-end encryption solution on top of it.

But Murgatroyd said the end-to-end encryption algorithm designed by TCCA is different. It doesn’t specify the key length the radios should use because governments using the end-to-end encryption have their own “specific and often proprietary security rules” for the devices they use. Therefore they are able to customize the TCCA encryption algorithm in their devices by working with their radio supplier to select the “encryption algorithm, key management and so on” that is right for them—but only to a degree.

“The choice of encryption algorithm and key is made between supplier and customer organisation, and ETSI has no input to this selection—nor knowledge of which algorithms and key lengths are in use in any system,” he said. But he added that radio manufacturers and customers “will always have to abide by export control regulations.”

The researchers say they cannot verify that the TCCA E2EE doesn’t specify a key length because the TCCA documentation describing the solution is protected by a nondisclosure agreement and provided only to radio vendors. But they note that the E2EE system calls out an “algorithm identifier” number, which means it calls out the specific algorithm it’s using for the end-to-end encryption. These identifiers are not vendor specific, the researchers say, which suggests the identifiers refer to different key variants produced by TCCA—meaning TCCA provides specifications for algorithms that use a 126 bit key or 56 bit key, and radio vendors can configure their devices to use either of these variants, depending on the export controls in place for the purchasing country.

Whether users know their radios could have this vulnerability is unclear. The researchers found a confidential 2006 Sepura product bulletin that someone leaked online, which mentions that “the length of the traffic key … is subject to export control regulations and hence the [encryption system in the device] will be factory configured to support 128, 64, or 56 bit key lengths.” But it’s not clear what Sepura customers receive or if other manufacturers whose radios use a reduced key disclose to customers if their radios use a reduced-key algorithm.

“Some manufacturers have this in brochures; others only mention this in internal communications, and others don’t mention it at all,” says Wetzels. He says they did extensive open-source research to examine vendor documentation and “ found no clear sign of weakening being communicated to end users. So while … there are ‘some’ mentions of the algorithm being weakened, it is not fully transparent at all.”

Sepura did not respond to an inquiry from WIRED.

But Murgatroyd says that because government customers who have opted to use TCCA’s E2EE solution need to know the security of their devices, they are likely to be aware if their systems are using a reduced key.

“As end-to-end encryption is primarily used for government communications, we would expect that the relevant government National Security agencies are fully aware of the capabilities of their end-to-end encryption systems and can advise their users appropriately,” Murgatroyd wrote in his email.

Wetzels is skeptical of this, however. “We consider it highly unlikely non-Western governments are willing to spend literally millions of dollars if they know they’re only getting 56 bits of security,” he says.

This story originally appeared at WIRED.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

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Texas prepares for war as invasion of flesh-eating flies appears imminent

cattle, flesh-eating, flies, health, livestock, mexico, Science, screwworms, sterile insect technique, swormlure, texas, USDA / Beth Washington / August 9, 2025

Past success

As the flies’ host and geographic range expand, pressure is intensifying to control the flies—something many countries have managed to do in the past.

Decades ago, screwworms were endemic throughout Central America and the southern US. However, governments across the regions used intensive, coordinated control efforts to push the flies southward. Screwworms were eliminated from the US around 1966, and were pushed downward through Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. They were eventually declared eliminated from Panama in 2006, with the population held at bay by a biological barrier at the Darién Gap, at the border of Panama and Colombia. However, in 2022, the barrier was breached, and the flies began advancing northward, primarily through unmonitored livestock movements. The latest surveillance suggests the flies are now about 370 miles south of Texas.

The main method to wipe out screwworms is the sterile insect technique (SIT), which exploits a weakness in the fly’s life cycle since they tend to only mate once. In the 1950s, researchers at the US Department of Agriculture figured out they could use gamma radiation to sterilize male flies without affecting their ability to find mates. They then bred massive amounts of male flies, sterilized them, and carpet-bombed infested areas with aerial releases, which tanked the population.

Panama, in partnership with the US, maintained the biological barrier at the Colombian border with continual sterile-fly bombings for years. But as the flies approached this year, the USDA shifted its aerial deliveries to Mexico. In June, the USDA announced plans to set up a new sterile fly facility in Texas for aerial deliveries to northern Mexico. And last month, the USDA halted livestock trade from southern entry points.

Miller said in the announcement today that SIT is no longer enough, and Texas is taking its own steps. Those include the new bait, insecticides, and new feed for livestock and deer laced with the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin. Miller also said that the state aims to develop a vaccine for cattle that could kill larvae, but such a shot is still in development.

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Review: The Sandman S2 is a classic tragedy, beautifully told

culture, Entertainment, Neil Gaiman, netflix, Reviews, streaming television, The Sandman, TV reviews / Beth Washington / August 9, 2025

I unequivocally loved the first season of The Sandman, the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s influential graphic novel series (of which I am longtime fan). I thought it captured the surreal, dream-like feel and tone of its source material, striking a perfect balance between the anthology approach of the graphic novels and grounding the narrative by focusing on the arc of its central figure: Morpheus, lord of the Dreaming. It’s been a long wait for the second and final season, but S2 retains all those elements to bring Dream’s story to its inevitably tragic, yet satisfying, end.

(Spoilers below; some major S2 reveals after the second gallery. We’ll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

When Netflix announced in January that The Sandman would end with S2, speculation abounded that this was due to sexual misconduct allegations against Gaiman (who has denied them). However, showrunner Allan Heinberg wrote on X that the plan had long been for there to be only two seasons because the show’s creators felt they had only enough material to fill two seasons, and frankly, they were right. The first season covered the storylines of Preludes and Nocturnes and A Doll’s House, with bonus episodes adapting “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Calliope” from Dream Country.

The S2 source material is drawn primarily from Seasons of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake, weaving in relevant material from Fables and Reflections—most notably “The Song of Orpheus” and elements of “Thermidor”—and the award-winning “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from Dream Country. This season’s bonus episode adapts the 1993 standalone spinoff Death: The High Cost of Living. All that’s really missing is A Game of You—which focuses on Barbie (a minor character introduced in A Doll’s House) trying to save her magical dream realm from the evil forces of the Cuckoo—and a handful of standalone short stories. None of that material has any bearing on the Dream King’s larger character arc, so we lose little by the omissions.

Making amends

After escaping his captors, regaining his talismans, tracking down the rogue Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), and dealing with a Vortex, S2 finds Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) rebuilding the Dreaming, which had fallen into disrepair during his long absence. He is interrupted by his sibling Destiny’s (Adrian Lester) unexpected summons to a family meeting, including Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles).

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Net neutrality advocates won’t appeal loss, say they don’t trust Supreme Court

Net Neutrality, Policy, Supreme Court / Beth Washington / August 9, 2025

Court ruled broadband isn’t telecommunications

Although the Obama-era FCC won on this point in the District of Columbia Circuit in 2016, a Supreme Court ruling in 2024 gave courts more power to block rules when judges disagree with an agency’s interpretation of federal statutes. Judges at the 6th Circuit subsequently decided that broadband must be classified as an “information service” under US law.

“The 6th Circuit’s decision earlier this year was spectacularly wrong, and the protections it struck down are extremely important. But rather than attempting to overcome an agency that changed hands—and a Supreme Court majority that cares very little about the rule of law—we’ll keep fighting for Internet affordability and openness in Congress, state legislatures and other court proceedings nationwide,” Wood said.

Besides Free Press, groups announcing that they won’t appeal are the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, New America’s Open Technology Institute, and Public Knowledge.

“Though the 6th Circuit erred egregiously in its decision to overturn the FCC’s 2024 Open Internet order, there are other ways we can advance our fight for consumer protections and ISP accountability than petitioning the Supreme Court to review this case—and, given the current legal landscape, we believe our efforts will be more effective if focused on those alternatives,” said Raza Panjwani, senior policy counsel at the Open Technology Institute.

Net neutrality could still reach the Supreme Court in another case. Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior counselor of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, said that “the 6th Circuit decision makes bad policy as well as bad law. Because it is at odds with the holdings of two other circuits, we expect to take the issue to the Supreme Court in a future case.”

California still enforces a net neutrality law. ISPs tried to get that law struck down, but courts decided that states could regulate net neutrality when the FCC isn’t doing so.

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It’s getting harder to skirt RTO policies without employers noticing

Biz & IT, return-to-office / Beth Washington / August 9, 2025

For example, while high-profile banks like JPMorgan Chase and HSBC have started enforcing in-office policies, London-headquartered bank Standard Chartered is letting managers and individual employees decide how often workers are expected in the office. In July, Standard CEO Bill Winters told Bloomberg Television:

We work with adults. The adults can have an adult conversation with other adults and decide how they’re going to best manage their team.

The differing management methods come as numerous corporations have pointed to in-office work as driving collaboration, ideation, and, in some cases, revenue, while numerous studies point to RTO policies hurting employee morale and risking employee retention.

“There are some markets where there’s effectively peer pressure to come in more often, and there’s other markets where there’s less of that,” Winters said. “People come into the office because they want to come into the office.”

Office space

After the COVID-19 pandemic forced many businesses to figure out how to function with remote workers, there was speculation that the commercial real estate business would seriously suffer long-term. CNBC reported that the US office vacancy rate (18.9 percent) is currently near the highest we’ve seen in 30 years (19 percent).

However, CBRE, which has big stakes here, found that out of the companies it surveyed, more are planning to expand office space than reduce it. Per the report, 67 percent of companies said they will expand or maintain the size of their office space over the next three years, compared to 64 percent last year. Thirty-three percent of respondents overall said they will reduce office space; however, among companies with at least 10,000 employees, 60 percent are planning to downsize. Among the companies planning to downsize, 79 percent said they are doing so because more hybrid work means that they need less space.

“Employers are much more focused now than they were pre-pandemic on quality of workplace experience, the efficiency of seat sharing, and the vibrancy of the districts in which they’re located,” Julie Whelan, CBRE’s global head of occupier research, told CNBC.

Although tariffs and broader economic uncertainty are turning some corporations away from long-term real estate decisions, Whelan said many firms are ready to make decisions about office space, “even if there’s a little bit of economic uncertainty right now.”

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Rocket Report: Firefly lights the markets up; SpaceX starts selling trips to Mars

rocket report, Space / Beth Washington / August 8, 2025

All the news that’s fit to lift

“Get on board! We are going to Mars!”

The Vulcan rocket for ULA’s first national security mission nears its initial launch, NET August 12. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Welcome to Edition 8.06 of the Rocket Report! After years of disappointing results from SPACs and space companies, it is a good sign to see Firefly’s more traditional initial public offering doing so well. The company has had such a long and challenging road over more than a decade; the prospect of their success should be heartening to the commercial space industry.

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.

Virgin Galactic delays resumption of spaceflights. The Richard Branson-founded company plans to resume private space tourism trips in the autumn of 2026 after its Delta spacecraft’s first commercial flight, a research mission that was delayed from summer 2026 to also occur in the fall, Bloomberg reports. Virgin Galactic announced an updated timeline on Wednesday, when it reported quarterly financial results that fell short of analysts’ expectations. Revenue was about $410,000 for the second quarter.

Waiting on Delta … The company paused commercial operations in June 2024 to focus on developing the upgraded Delta vehicle, which is being optimized for reusability and faster turnaround time between flights. Virgin Galactic had been selling seats on the Delta spacecraft for about $600,000 and said that it plans to raise prices when ticket sales resume in the first quarter of 2026. The company also recently adjusted the size of its in-house engineering team and reduced the overall headcount by 7 percent to control costs.

Firefly is a big hit with investors. Shares in the Cedar Park, Texas-based space company began trading at $70 on the NASDAQ stock exchange midday Thursday under the symbol FLY, jumping from their initial public offering price of $45, The Wall Street Journal reports. The company sold more than 19 million shares in the listing, raising $868 million. Bankers and traders are closely tracking the stock’s performance as a sign of both the US IPO market strength and investor interest in space companies. The offering will allow the company to accelerate production and its launch cadence, Firefly CEO Jason Kim said in an interview.

Time to build and fly … “We have to execute,” said Kim, who led a Boeing satellite business before taking the top role at Firefly last year. “We’ve got a really strong backlog.” Firefly’s listing comes five months after it successfully guided its Blue Ghost lander to the lunar surface, carrying scientific gear to research moondust and ground temperatures. The NASA-funded mission marked the first fully successful private moon landing, following misfires on three other flights handled by competitors. The company’s next challenge is to prove that its other vehicles can work as well, including the Alpha rocket.

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s and Stephen Clark’s reporting on all things space is to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll collect their stories and deliver them straight to your inbox.

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iRocket says it has signed a huge deal. A largely unknown small launch startup, iRocket, says it has signed a multi-year agreement with SpaceBelt KSA valued at up to $640 million. iRocket will support up to 30 satellite launches, providing mission planning, propulsion systems, and integration services to help establish a secure, autonomous space communications network across Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region.

Yes, but … iRocket says the agreement represents a significant commercial milestone. However, since its founding in 2018, New York-based iRocket hasn’t released much information on any technical progress toward a first flight of the Shockwave launch vehicle. It is difficult to know how much (if any) money changed hands with this agreement.

Indian space startup builds 3D-printed engine. The Chennai-based startup Agnikul Cosmos has announced the successful development of the world’s largest single-piece 3D-printed Inconel rocket engine, Business Today reports. The engine, printed in one go without any welds, joints, or fasteners, represents a leap in additive manufacturing for aerospace, the company said.

Earned a patent … Agnikul also said it has been granted a US patent for the design and manufacturing process of single-piece rocket engines. “Means something to have a completely Indian-origin design patented in the US—a nation that has built some of the most complex engines in this industry,” the company said. Agnikul is developing a small-lift booster that can put about 100 kg to low-Earth orbit.

Skyrora wins first UK launch license. Skyrora became the first British commercial rocket manufacturer to secure a launch license from the UK Civil Aviation Authority, paving the way for its Skylark L suborbital rocket to lift off from the SaxaVord spaceport in the Shetland Islands, Payload reports. Derek Harris, Skyrora’s business development lead, said this test flight could take place as early as May 2026.

Waiting on launch pads … Skyrora said it could launch sooner if it opted to fly from an international launch pad. That’s the route it took in 2022, when it launched a rocket from Iceland’s mobile Langanes launch site. “Unfortunately, we are still technically locked out of SaxaVord,” Harris said. “What is still open to us is Oman, and Australia, or even going back to Iceland…[but] it would be a sad indictment of what’s going on with the government funding if we have to go elsewhere to launch it.”

The Philippines condemns China’s rocket launch. A top Philippine security official on Tuesday condemned China’s latest rocket launch, which caused suspected debris to fall near a western Philippine province, the AP reports. Authorities said the incident sparked alarm and posed a danger to people, ships, and aircraft. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage from the suspected Chinese rocket debris that fell near Palawan province Monday night, following a launch of the medium-lift Long March 12.

No NOTAMs it seems … China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported that the Long March-12 rocket that lifted off Monday night from a commercial spacecraft launch site on the southern island province of Hainan successfully carried a group of Internet satellites into pre-set orbit. It was not immediately clear whether Chinese authorities had notified nearby countries, such as the Philippines, of possible debris from its latest rocket launch. Philippine aircraft and vessels were deployed on Tuesday to search for the rocket debris.

Crew-11 mission launches from Florida. The next four-person team to live and work aboard the International Space Station departed from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center last Friday, taking aim at the massive orbiting research complex for a planned stay of six to eight months, Ars reports. Spacecraft commander Zena Cardman leads the mission, designated Crew-11, with three others aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule: veteran NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui of Japan, and Oleg Platonov of Russia.

Au revoir to an old friend … The Falcon 9’s reusable first stage booster detached and returned to a propulsive touchdown at Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, a few miles south of the launch site. This was the 53rd and final rocket landing at LZ-1 since SpaceX aced the first intact recovery of a Falcon 9 booster there on December 21, 2015. SpaceX will move onshore rocket landings to new landing zones to be constructed next to the two Falcon 9 launch pads at the Florida spaceport. Landing Zone 2, located adjacent to Landing Zone 1, will also be decommissioned and handed back over to the Space Force once SpaceX activates the new landing sites.

NASA says it will move a space shuttle. The head of NASA has decided to move one of the agency’s retired space shuttles to Houston, but which shuttle remains unclear, Ars reports. Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), who earlier this year introduced and championed an effort to relocate the space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian to Space Center Houston, issued a statement on Tuesday evening applauding the decision. The senator did not state which of NASA’s winged orbiters would be making the move.

Playing coy for no clear reason … The legislation that required Duffy to choose a “space vehicle” that had “flown in space” and “carried people” did not specify an orbiter by name, but the language in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that President Donald Trump signed into law last month was inspired by Cornyn and fellow Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s bill to relocate Discovery. It is unclear why the choice of orbiters is being kept a secret. According to the bill, the decision was to be made “with the concurrence of an entity designated” by the NASA administrator to display the shuttle. Cornyn’s release only confirmed that Duffy had identified the location to be “a non-profit near the Johnson Space Center.”

SpaceX begins offering Starship services to Mars. On Thursday, Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, announced that the company has begun selling rides to Mars. “Get on board! We are going to Mars! SpaceX is now offering Starship services to the red planet,” Shotwell said on X. As part of the announcement, Shotwell said SpaceX has signed a “first of its kind” agreement with the Italian Space Agency.

Racing the Giro d’Mars … The president of the Italian Space Agency, Teodoro Valente, confirmed the news, saying the first Starship flights to Mars (which will, of course, be uncrewed) will carry Italian experiments. “The payloads will gather scientific data during the missions. Italy continues to lead in space exploration!” Valente wrote on X. Left unsaid, of course, is when such flights will take place. It is difficult to see Starship now being ready for a late 2026 window, but early 2029 seems plausible.

ULA will eventually test reuse technology. On Thursday, ahead of the first Vulcan launch of a national security payload next week, United Launch Alliance chief executive Tory Bruno spoke with reporters about various topics, NASA Spaceflight reports. A highlight was ULA’s progress on SMART Reuse, a system aimed at recovering and reusing booster components to reduce costs. Bruno announced that the critical design review for key components is complete, paving the way for building flight-like hardware for certification.

Testing remains a ways away … As development progresses, ULA plans to relocate more components to the aft section of the booster for recovery. “By the time that path is finished, pretty much the only thing being discarded from the booster will be the fuel tanks,” he said. Experimental flights incorporating SMART Reuse could begin as early as 2026, or at least by 2027, but only when aligned with customer needs. One wonders when actual engine recovery and reuse might begin.

Next three launches

August 8: Falcon 9 | Project Kuiper KF-02 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 13: 40 UTC

August 8: Jielong 3 | Undeclared payload | Offshore site, Chinese coastal waters | 16: 30 UTC

August 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-4 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 03: 43 UTC

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

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Sonos says it’s forced to raise prices while trying to win back customers

Sonos, tariffs, Tech / Beth Washington / August 7, 2025

During that call, Sonos CFO Saori Casey said that the company expects “tariff expenses will be approximately $5 million in Q4.” In Sonos’ fiscal Q3, it paid $3.5 million in tariffs, Casey said.

Sonos is still recovering from app problems

Since July 2024, when Sonos’ then-CEO Patrick Spence admitted that a software update inadvertently broke many Sonos devices, the company has been trying to prove to customers and investors that its pricey audio devices are still worth buying.

During the earnings call, Conrad said he believes the value of Sonos gadgets “compounds over time, thanks to the kinds of software updates that deliver new experiences.” But a widely reviled app update last year damaged Sonos’ reputation in this area. The update stripped the app of some basic features, such as the ability to edit playlists and song queues, and many Sonos devices, especially older ones, stopped functioning properly.

Meanwhile, Sonos hasn’t released a new product since the Arc Ultra soundbar and Sub 4 subwoofer in October 2024. In March, reports surfaced that Sonos axed its streaming video player. Conrad told investors yesterday that Sonos has a release roadmap going beyond its 2026 fiscal year. Any devices in that roadmap, however, will be challenged to sell customers on their software, long-term reliability, and price.

Customers may cut Sonos some slack, considering the widespread impact that tariffs are expected to have on electronics pricing. In May, the Trump administration axed the de minimis exemption that enabled duty-free imports of goods worth $800 or less, impacting electronics such as PC peripherals and DIY parts. Currently, the US and China have paused tariffs as the countries look to reach an agreement by August 12. At that time, goods imported from China could face tariffs as high as 145 percent, which would significantly impact the prices of most electronics sold in the US.

But Sonos is already struggling to release and sell new products at high prices, so raising them even higher could further harm the company.

“We lost the momentum in 2024. We’re starting to get it back, and we’re going to accelerate our pace from here,” Conrad said.

Sonos says it’s forced to raise prices while trying to win back customers Read More »

President Trump says Intel’s new CEO “must resign immediately”

Donald Trump, intel, Lip-Bu Tan, Policy, syndication, Tech / Beth Washington / August 7, 2025

Intel and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s post. Intel shares dropped 3 percent in pre-market trading in New York.

Tan was appointed as Intel CEO in March after the Silicon Valley company’s board ousted his predecessor, Pat Gelsinger, in December.

Intel is the only US-headquartered company capable of producing advanced semiconductors, though it has so far largely missed out on the current boom for artificial intelligence chips. It has been awarded billions of dollars in US government subsidies and loans to support its chip manufacturing business, which has fallen far behind its rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

However, amid a radical cost-cutting program, Tan warned last month that Intel might be forced to abandon development of its next-generation manufacturing technology if it were unable to secure a “significant external customer.” Such a move would hand a virtual monopoly of leading-edge chipmaking to TSMC.

“Intel is required to be a responsible steward of American taxpayer dollars and to comply with applicable security regulations,” Cotton wrote in Tuesday’s letter to Intel’s board chair, Frank Yeary. “Mr Tan’s associations raise questions about Intel’s ability to fulfill these obligations.”

Additional reporting by Demetri Sevastopulo.

President Trump says Intel’s new CEO “must resign immediately” Read More »

Trump’s trade and environment policies are a disaster for carmakers

Cars, EV adoption, trump tariffs / Beth Washington / August 6, 2025

General Motors blamed Trump’s tariffs for costing it $1.1 billion in Q2 and as much as $5 billion by the end of the year. And while the new anti-EV adoption policies are yet to fully bite, it’s clear they’ve motivated some action inside the GM boardroom. Although GM CEO Mary Barra wrote to investors that the company believes “the long-term future is profitable electric vehicle production,” she followed by explaining that GM’s flexible factories will help it succeed in a world where EPA fuel economy targets are no longer a thing. That’s probably why GM added 300,000 more units of capacity for “high margin light-duty pickups, full-size SUVs and crossovers.”

Ford said that the tariffs could cost it as much as $2 billion this year, despite it making more actual vehicles in the US than any other automaker. That’s because it has to pay the US government to import raw materials like steel and aluminum, as well as components and subassemblies.

Foreign automakers are also feeling the effects, given the importance—until now, at least—of the US car buyer. Stellantis, which owns the Jeep and Ram brands, said it had already lost $2.7 billion this year due to tariffs, although the automaker stands to benefit in the coming years from the gutting of fleet fuel efficiency fines.

Aston Martin may benefit from a lower 10 percent tariff for UK-made cars, but it described the process as “extremely disruptive,” and although it has now restarted shipping cars to America, it issued a profit warning last week.

BMW is among the less badly hurt; although its operating margin fell to 5.4 percent, this was within its expectations. Mercedes had to warn investors to expect less this year, and it says the US will become a less-important market for the company, which plans to make up for it with growth in China. Volkswagen Group said the tariffs have cost it $1.5 billion so far this year, and it has also revised down its forecasts for the rest of the year.

Although Porsche announced record deliveries in North America just a week ago, its operating profit was a third of that a year ago. “In the US, import tariffs are also putting huge pressure on our business. Looking ahead, the movement of the dollar could also have an impact. In addition, the transformation to electric mobility is progressing more slowly than expected overall, with consequences for the supplier network,” said Porsche and VW Group CEO Oliver Blume.

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Some AI tools don’t understand biology yet

AI, Biology, foundation models, gene expression, Genetics, molecular biology, Science / Beth Washington / August 6, 2025

A collection of new studies on gene activity shows that AI tools aren’t very good.

Gene activity appears to remain beyond the abilities of AI at the moment. Credit: BSIP

Biology is an area of science where AI and machine-learning approaches have seen some spectacular successes, such as designing enzymes to digest plastics and proteins to block snake venom. But in an era of seemingly endless AI hype, it might be easy to think that we could just set AI loose on the mounds of data we’ve already generated and end up with a good understanding of most areas of biology, allowing us to skip a lot of messy experiments and the unpleasantness of research on animals.

But biology involves a whole lot more than just protein structures. And it’s extremely premature to suggest that AI can be equally effective at handling all aspects of biology. So we were intrigued to see a study comparing a set of AI software packages designed to predict how active genes will be in cells exposed to different conditions. As it turns out, the AI systems couldn’t manage to do any better than a deliberately simplified method of predicting.

The results serve as a useful caution that biology is incredibly complex, and developing AI systems that work for one aspect of it is not an indication that they can work for biology generally.

AI and gene activity

The study was conducted by a trio of researchers based in Heidelberg: Constantin Ahlmann-Eltze, Wolfgang Huber, and Simon Anders. They note that a handful of additional studies have been released while their work was on a pre-print server, all of them coming to roughly the same conclusions. But these authors’ approach is pretty easy to understand, so we’ll use it as an example.

The AI software they examined attempts to predict changes in gene activity. While every cell carries copies of the roughly 20,000 genes in the human genome, not all of them are active in a given cell—”active” in this case meaning they are producing messenger RNAs. Some provide an essential function and are active at high levels at all times. Others are only active in specific cell types, like nerves or skin. Still others are activated under specific conditions, like low oxygen or high temperatures.

Over the years, we’ve done many studies examining the activity of every gene in a given cell type under different conditions. These studies can range from using gene chips to determine which messenger RNAs are present in a population of cells to sequencing the RNAs isolated from single cells and using that data to identify which genes are active. But collectively, they can provide a broad, if incomplete, picture that links the activity of genes with different biological circumstances. It’s a picture you could potentially use to train an AI that would make predictions about gene activity under conditions that haven’t been tested.

Ahlmann-Eltze, Huber, and Anders tested a set of what are called single-cell foundation models that have been trained on this sort of gene activity data. The “single cell” portion indicates that these models have been trained on gene activity obtained from individual cells rather than a population average of a cell type. Foundation models mean that they have been trained on a broad range of data but will require additional training before they’re deployed for a specific task.

Underwhelming performance

The task in this case is predicting how gene activity might change when genes are altered. When an individual gene is lost or activated, it’s possible that the only messenger RNA that is altered is the one made by that gene. But some genes encode proteins that regulate a collection of other genes, in which case you might see changes in the activity of dozens of genes. In other cases, the loss or activation of a gene could affect a cell’s metabolism, resulting in widespread alterations of gene activity.

Things get even more complicated when two genes are involved. In many cases, the genes will do unrelated things, and you get a simple additive effect: the changes caused by the loss of one, plus the changes caused by the loss of others. But if there’s some overlap between the functions, you can get an enhancement of some changes, suppression of others, and other unexpected changes.

To start exploring these effects, researchers have intentionally altered the activity of one or more genes using the CRISPR DNA editing technology, then sequenced every RNA in the cell afterward to see what sorts of changes took place. This approach (termed Perturb-seq) is useful because it can give us a sense of what the altered gene does in a cell. But for Ahlmann-Eltze, Huber, and Anders, it provides the data they need to determine if these foundation models can be trained to predict the ensuing changes in the activity of other genes.

Starting with the foundation models, the researchers conducted additional training using data from an experiment where either one or two genes were activated using CRISPR. This training used the data from 100 individual gene activations and another 62 where two genes were activated. Then, the AI packages were asked to predict the results for another 62 pairs of genes that were activated. For comparison, the researchers also made predictions using two extremely simple models: one that always predicted that nothing would change and a second that always predicted an additive effect (meaning that activating genes A and B would produce the changes caused by activating A plus the changes caused by activating B).

They didn’t work. “All models had a prediction error substantially higher than the additive baseline,” the researchers concluded. The result held when the researchers used alternative measurements of the accuracy of the AI’s predictions.

The gist of the problem seemed to be that the trained foundation models weren’t very good at predicting when the alterations of pairs of genes would produce complex patterns of changes—when the alteration of one gene synergized with the alteration of a second. “The deep learning models rarely predicted synergistic interactions, and it was even rarer that those predictions were correct,” the researchers concluded. In a separate test that looked specifically at these synergies between genes, it turned out that none of the models were better than the simplified system that always predicted no changes.

Not there yet

The overall conclusions from the work are pretty clear. “As our deliberately simple baselines are incapable of representing realistic biological complexity yet were not outperformed by the foundation models,” the researchers write, “we conclude that the latter’s goal of providing a generalizable representation of cellular states and predicting the outcome of not-yet-performed experiments is still elusive.”

It’s important to emphasize that “still elusive” doesn’t mean we’re incapable of ever developing an AI that can help with this problem. It also doesn’t mean that this applies to all cellular states (the results are specific to gene activity), much less all of biology. At the same time, the work provides a valuable caution at a time when there’s a lot of enthusiasm for the idea that AI’s success in a couple of areas means we’re on the cusp of a world where it can be applied to anything.

Nature Methods, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41592-025-02772-6 (About DOIs).

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.

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RIP to the Macintosh HD hard drive icon, 2000–2025

Apple, macos 26 tahoe, Tech / Beth Washington / August 6, 2025

That version of the icon persisted through the Apple Silicon-era Big Sur redesign and was still with us in the first public beta build for macOS 26 Tahoe that Apple released last week. The new beta also updates the icons for external drives (orange, with a USB-C connector on top), network shares (blue, with a globe on top), and removable disk images (white, with an arrow on top).

All of the system’s disk icons get an update in the latest macOS 26 Tahoe developer beta. Credit: Apple/Andrew Cunningham

Other icons that reused or riffed on the old hard drive icon have also been changed. Disk Utility now looks like a wrench tightening an Apple-branded white bolt, for some reason, and drive icons within Disk Utility also have the new SSD-esque icon. Installer apps use the new icon instead of the old one. Navigate to the /System/Library/CoreServices folder where many of the built-in operating system icons live, and you can see a bunch of others that exchange the old HDD icon for the new SSD.

Apple first offered a Mac with an SSD in 2008, when the original MacBook Air came out. By the time “Retina” Macs began arriving in the early 2010s, SSDs had become the primary boot disk for most of them; laptops tended to be all-SSD, while desktops could be configured with an SSD or a hybrid Fusion Drive that used an SSD as boot media and an HDD for mass storage. Apple stopped shipping spinning hard drives entirely when the last of the Intel iMacs went away.

This doesn’t actually matter much. The old icon didn’t look much like the SSD in your Mac, and the new one doesn’t really look like the SSD in your Mac either. But we didn’t want to let the old icon’s passing go unremarked. So, thanks for the memories, Macintosh HD hard drive icon! Keep on spinning, wherever you are.

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OpenAI releases its first open source models since 2019

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Open Source, openai / Beth Washington / August 5, 2025

OpenAI is releasing new generative AI models today, and no, GPT-5 is not one of them. Depending on how you feel about generative AI, these new models may be even more interesting, though. The company is rolling out gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, its first open weight models since the release of GPT-2 in 2019. You can download and run these models on your own hardware, with support for simulated reasoning, tool use, and deep customization.

When you access the company’s proprietary models in the cloud, they’re running on powerful server infrastructure that cannot be replicated easily, even in enterprise. The new OpenAI models come in two variants (120b and 20b) to be run on less powerful hardware configurations. Both are transformers with configurable chain of thought (CoT), supporting low, medium, and high settings. The lower settings are faster and use fewer compute resources, but the outputs are better with the highest setting. You can set the CoT level with a single line in the system prompt.

The smaller gpt-oss-20b has a total of 21 billion parameters, utilizing mixture-of-experts (MoE) to reduce that to 3.6 billion parameters per token. As for gpt-oss-120b, its 117 billion parameters come down to 5.1 billion per token with MoE. The company says the smaller model can run on a consumer-level machine with 16GB or more of memory. To run gpt-oss-120b, you need 80GB of memory, which is more than you’re likely to find in the average consumer machine. It should fit on a single AI accelerator GPU like the Nvidia H100, though. Both models have a context window of 128,000 tokens.

The team says users of gpt-oss can expect robust performance similar to its leading cloud-based models. The larger one benchmarks between the o3 and o4-mini proprietary models in most tests, with the smaller version running just a little behind. It gets closest in math and coding tasks. In the knowledge-based Humanity’s Last Exam, o3 is far out in front with 24.9 percent (with tools), while gpt-oss-120b only manages 19 percent. For comparison, Google’s leading Gemini Deep Think hits 34.8 percent in that test.

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Author name: Beth Washington