Mike M.

Keep your receipts: Tech firms told to prepare for possible tariff refunds

chip tariffs, Policy, semiconductor tariffs, trump tariffs, us-china trade war / Mike M. / November 21, 2025

Tech firms dare to dream chip tariffs may go away amid rumors of delays.

For months, the Trump administration has warned that semiconductor tariffs are coming soon, leaving the tech industry on pins and needles after a chaotic year of unpredictable tariff regimes collectively cost firms billions.

The semiconductor tariffs are key to Donald Trump’s economic agenda, which is intended to force more manufacturing into the US by making it more expensive to import materials and products. He campaigned on axing the CHIPS Act—which provided subsidies to companies investing in manufacturing chips in the US—complaining that it was a “horrible, horrible thing” to “give hundreds of billions of dollars” away when the US could achieve the same objective by instead taxing companies and “use whatever is left over” of CHIPS funding to “reduce debt.” However, as 2025 winds down, the US president faces pressure on all sides to delay semiconductor tariffs, insiders told Reuters, and it appears that he is considering caving.

According to “two people with direct knowledge of the matter and a third person briefed on the conversations,” US officials have privately told industry and government stakeholders that semiconductor tariffs will likely be delayed.

A fourth insider suggested Trump was hesitant to impose tariffs that could rock the recent US-China trade truce, while Reuters noted that Trump may also be hesitant to announce new tariffs during the holiday shopping season that risk increasing prices of popular consumer tech products. Recently, Trump cut tariffs on grocery items in the face of mounting consumer backlash, so imposing new tariffs now—risking price hikes on laptops, game consoles, and smartphones—surely wouldn’t improve his record-low approval rating.

In April, Trump started threatening semiconductor tariffs as high as 100 percent, prompting a Commerce Department probe into the potential economic and national security impacts of imposing broad chip tariffs. Stakeholders were given 30 days to weigh in, and tech industry associations were quick to urge Trump to avoid imposing broad tariffs that they warned risked setting back US chip manufacturing, ruining US tech competitiveness, and hobbling innovation. The best policy would be no chip tariffs, some industry groups suggested.

Glimmer of hope chip tariffs may never come

Whether Trump would ever give up on imposing broad chip tariffs that he thinks will ensure that the US becomes a world-leading semiconductor hub is likely a tantalizing daydream for companies relieved by rumors that chip tariffs may be delayed. But it’s not completely improbable that he might let this one go.

During Trump’s first term, he threatened tariffs on foreign cars that did not come to pass until his second term. When it comes to the semiconductor tariffs, Trump may miss his chance to act if he’s concerned about losing votes in the midterm elections.

The Commerce Department’s investigation must conclude by December 27, after which Trump has 90 days to decide if he wants to move ahead with tariffs based on the findings.

He could, of course, do nothing or claim to disagree with the findings and seek an alternative path to impose tariffs, but there’s a chance that his own party may add to the pressure to delay them. Trump’s low approval rating is already hurting Republicans in polls, New York Magazine reported, and some are begging Trump to join them on the campaign trail next year to avoid a midterm slump, Politico reported.

For tech companies, the goal is to persuade Trump to either drop or narrowly tailor semiconductor tariffs—and hopefully eliminate the threat of tariffs on downstream products, which could force tech companies to pay double or triple taxes on imports. If they succeed, they could be heading into 2026 with more stable supply chains and even possibly with billions in tariff refunds in their pockets, if the Supreme Court deems Trump’s “emergency” “reciprocal tariffs” illegal.

Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), attended oral arguments in the SCOTUS case, noting on LinkedIn that “business executives have had to contend with over 100 announcements of tariff changes since the beginning of 2025.”

“I hope to see the Supreme Court rule swiftly to provide businesses the certainty they need,” Shapiro said, arguing in a second post that tariffs “cause uncertainty for businesses, snarl supply chains, and drive inflation and higher costs for consumers.”

As tech companies wait to see how the court rules and how Trump responds to the conclusion of the Commerce Department’s probe, uncertainty remains. CTA’s vice president of international trade, Ed Brzytwa, told Ars that the CTA has advised tech firms to keep their receipts and document all tariff payments.

How chip tariffs could raise prices

Without specifying what was incorrect, a White House official disputed Reuters’ reporting that Trump may shift the timeline for announcing semiconductor tariffs, saying simply “that is not true.”

A Commerce Department official said there was “no change” to report, insisting that the “administration remains committed to reshoring manufacturing that’s critical to our national and economic security.”

But neither official shared any details on when tariffs might be finalized, Reuters reported. And the Commerce Department did not respond to Ars’ request for information on when the public could expect to review findings of its probe.

In comments submitted to the Commerce Department, the Semiconductor Industry Association warned that “for every dollar that a semiconductor chip increases in price, products with embedded semiconductors will have to raise their sales price by $3 to maintain their previous margins.” That makes it easy to see how semiconductor tariffs risk significantly raising prices on any product containing a chip, depending how high the tariff rate is, including products like refrigerators, cars, video game consoles, coffee makers, smartphones, and the list goes on.

It’s estimated that chip tariffs could cost the semiconductor industry more than $1 billion. However, the bigger threat to the semiconductor industry would be if the higher prices of US-made chip made it harder to compete with “companies who sell comparable chips at a lower price globally,” SIA reported. Additionally, “higher input costs from tariffs” could also “force domestic companies to divert funds away from R&D,” the group noted. US firms that Trump wants to promote could rapidly lose their edge in such a scenario.

Echoing SIA, the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) warned the Commerce Department that “broad tariffs would significantly increase input costs for a wide range of downstream industries, raising costs for consumers while decreasing revenues for domestic semiconductor producers, the very industry this investigation seeks to protect.”

To avoid harming key US industries, CCIA recommended that any semiconductor tariffs imposed “focus narrowly” on semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment “that are critical for national defense and sourced from countries of concern.” The group also suggested creating high and low-risk categories, so that “low-risk goods, such as the import of commercial-grade printed circuit boards used in consumer electronics from key partners” wouldn’t get hit with taxes that have little to do with protecting US national security.

“US long-term competitiveness in both the semiconductor industry and downstream sectors could be greatly impaired if policy interventions are not carefully calibrated,” CCIA forecasted, warning that everyone would feel the pain, from small businesses to leading AI firms.

Trump’s plan for tariff funds makes no sense, groups say

Trump has been claiming since April that chip tariffs are coming soon, and he continues to use them as leverage in recent deals struck with Korea and Switzerland. But so far, while some countries have managed to negotiate rates as low as 15 percent, the semiconductor industry and downstream sectors remain in the dark on what to expect if and when the day finally comes that broader tariffs are announced.

Avoiding so-called tariff stacking—where products are taxed, as well as materials used in the products—is SIA’s biggest ask. The group “strongly” requested that Trump maintain “as simple of a tariff regime for semiconductors as possible,” given “the far-reaching consequences” the US could face if chip tariffs become as complex and burdensome to tech firms as reciprocal tariffs.

SIA also wants Trump to consider offering more refunds, perhaps offering to pay back “duties, taxes, and fees paid on imported parts, components, and materials that are incorporated in an exported product.”

Such a policy “would ensure the United States remains at the forefront of global chip technology,” SIA claimed, by making sure that tariffs collected “remain available for investments in expanding US manufacturing capacity and advanced research and development, as opposed to handed over to the US Treasury.”

Rather than refunding firms, Trump has instead proposed sharing tariffs as dividends, perhaps sending $2,000 checks to low and middle-income families. However, CNN spoke with experts who said the math doesn’t add up, making the prospect that Trump could send stimulus checks seem unlikely. He has also suggested the funds—which were projected to raise $158.4 billion in total revenue in 2025, CNN reported—could be used to reduce national debt.

Trump’s disdain for the CHIPS Act, casting it as a handout to tech firms, makes it seem unlikely that he’ll be motivated to refund firms or offer new incentives. Some experts doubt that he’ll make it easy for firms to get refunds of tariffs if the Supreme Court drafted such an order, or if a SCOTUS loss triggered a class action lawsuit.

CTA’s Shapiro said on LinkedIn that he’s “not sure” which way the SCOTUS case will go, but he’s hoping the verdict will come before the year’s end. Like industry groups urging Trump to keep semiconductor tariffs simple, Shapiro said he hoped Trump would streamline the process for any refunds coming. In the meantime, CTA advises firms to keep all documents itemizing tariffs paid to ensure firms aren’t stiffed if Trump’s go-to tariff regimes are deemed illegal.

“If plaintiffs prevail in this case, I hope to see the government keep it simple and ensure that retailers and importers get their tariff payments refunded swiftly and with as few hoops to jump through as possible,” Shapiro said.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Keep your receipts: Tech firms told to prepare for possible tariff refunds Read More »

Chris Hemsworth and dad fight Alzheimer’s with a trip down memory lane

Alzheimer's disease, Chris Hemsworth, culture, Disney Plus, Hulu, National Geographic, Science, science documentaries / Mike M. / November 21, 2025

Millions of people around the world are living with the harsh reality of Alzheimer’s disease, which also significantly impacts family members. Nobody is immune, as A-list actor Chris Hemsworth discovered when his own father was recently diagnosed. The revelation inspired Hemsworth to embark on a trip down memory lane with his father, which took them to Australia’s Northern Territory. The experience was captured on film for A Road Trip to Remember, a new documentary film from National Geographic.

Director Tom Barbor-Might had worked with Hemsworth on the latter’s documentary series Limitless, also for National Geographic. Each episode of Limitless follows Hemsworth on a unique challenge to push himself to the limits, augmented with interviews with scientific experts on such practices as fasting, extreme temperatures, brain-boosting, and regulating one’s stress response. Barbor-Might directed the season 1 finale, “Acceptance,” which was very different in tone, dealing with the inevitability of death and the need to confront one’s own mortality.

“It was really interesting to see Chris in that more intimate personal space, and he was great at it,” Barbor-Might told Ars. “He was charming, emotional, and vulnerable, and it was really moving. It felt like there was more work to be done there.” When Craig Hemsworth received his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to explore that personal element further.

Hemsworth found a scientific guide for this journey in Suraj Samtani, a clinical psychologist at the New South Wales Center for Healthy Brain Aging who specializes in dementia. Recent research has shown that one’s risk of dementia can be reduced by half by maintaining regular social interactions, and, even after a diagnosis, fostering strong social connections can slow cognitive decline. Revisiting past experiences, including visiting locations from one’s past, can also boost cognition in those with early onset dementia or Alzheimer’s—hence the Hemsworth road trip.

The first stage was to re-create the Melbourne family home from the 1990s. “The therapeutic practice of reminiscence therapy gave the film not only its intellectual and emotional underpinning, it gave it its structure,” said Barbor-Might. “We wanted to really explore this and also, as an audience, get a glimpse of their family life in the 1990s. It was a sequence that felt really important. The owner extraordinarily agreed to let us revert [the house]. They went and lived in a hotel for a month and were very, very noble and accommodating.”

Chris Hemsworth and dad fight Alzheimer’s with a trip down memory lane Read More »

Rocket Report: SpaceX’s next-gen booster fails; Pegasus will fly again

atlas v, blue origin, china, falcon 9, long march 2f, new glenn, Northrop Grumman, pythom, rocket lab, rocket report, saab, Science, shenzhou, Space, spacex, starship, super heavy, united launch alliance / Mike M. / November 21, 2025

With the government shutdown over, the FAA has lifted its daytime launch curfew.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn booster arrives at Port Canaveral, Florida, for the first time Tuesday aboard the “Jacklyn” landing vessel. Credit: Manuel Mazzanti/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Welcome to Edition 8.20 of the Rocket Report! For the second week in a row, Blue Origin dominated the headlines with news about its New Glenn rocket. After a stunning success November 13 with the launch and landing of the second New Glenn rocket, Jeff Bezos’ space company revealed a roadmap this week showing how engineers will supercharge the vehicle with more engines. Meanwhile, in South Texas, SpaceX took a step toward the first flight of the next-generation Starship rocket. There will be no Rocket Report next week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. We look forward to resuming delivery of all the news in space lift the first week of December.

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.

Northrop’s Pegasus rocket wins a rare contract. A startup named Katalyst Space Technologies won a $30 million contract from NASA in August to build a robotic rescue mission for the agency’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in low-Earth orbit. Swift, in space since 2004, is a unique instrument designed to study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the Universe. The spacecraft lacks a propulsion system and its orbit is subject to atmospheric drag, and NASA says it is “racing against the clock” to boost Swift’s orbit and extend its lifetime before it falls back to Earth. On Wednesday, Katalyst announced it selected Northrop Grumman’s air-launched Pegasus XL rocket to send the rescue craft into orbit next year.

Make this make sense … At first glance, this might seem like a surprise. The Pegasus XL rocket hasn’t flown since 2021 and has launched just once in the last six years. The solid-fueled rocket is carried aloft under the belly of a modified airliner, then released to fire payloads of up to 1,000 pounds (450 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit. It’s an expensive rocket for its size, with Northrop charging more than $25 million per launch, according to the most recent public data available; the satellites best suited to launch on Pegasus will now find much cheaper tickets to orbit on rideshare missions using SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. There are a few reasons none of this mattered much to Katalyst. First, the rescue mission must launch into a very specific low-inclination orbit to rendezvous with the Swift observatory, so it won’t be able to join one of SpaceX’s rideshare missions. Second, Northrop Grumman has parts available for one more Pegasus XL rocket, and the company might have been willing to sell the launch at a discount to clear its inventory and retire the rocket’s expensive-to-maintain L-1011 carrier aircraft. And third, smaller rockets like Rocket Lab’s Electron or Firefly’s Alpha don’t quite have the performance to place Katalyst’s rescue mission into the required orbit. (submitted by gizmo23)

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.

Sign Me Up!

Ursa Major rakes in more cash. Aerospace and defense startup Ursa Major Technologies landed a $600 million valuation in a new fundraising round, the latest sign that investors are willing to back companies developing new rocket technology, Bloomberg reports. Colorado-based Ursa Major closed its Series E fundraising round with investments from the venture capital firms Eclipse, Woodline Partners, Principia Growth, XN, and Alsop Louie Partners. The company also secured $50 million in debt financing. Ursa Major is best known as a supplier of liquid-fueled rocket engines and solid rocket motors to power a range of commercial and government vehicles.

Hypersonic tailwinds … Ursa Major says it is positioned to provide the US industrial base with propulsion systems faster and more affordably than legacy contractors can supply. “The company will rapidly field its throttleable, storable, liquid-fueled hypersonic and space-based defense solution, as well as scale its solid rocket motor and sustained space mobility manufacturing capacity,” Ursa Major said in a press release. Its customers include BAE Systems, which will use Ursa Major’s solid rocket motors to power tactical military-grade rockets, and Stratolaunch, which uses Ursa Major’s liquid-fueled Hadley engine for its hypersonic Talon-A spaceplane.

Rocket Lab celebrates two launches in 48 hours. Rocket Lab launched a payload for an undisclosed commercial customer Thursday, just hours after the company announced plans for the launch, Space News reports. The launch from Rocket Lab’s primary spaceport in New Zealand used the company’s Electron rocket, but officials released little more information on the mission, other than its nickname: “Follow My Speed.” An artist’s illustration on the mission patch indicated the payload might have been the next in a line of Earth-imaging satellites from the remote sensing company BlackSky, although the firm’s previous satellites have not launched with such secrecy.

Two hemispheres … Thursday’s launch from the Southern Hemisphere came just two days after Rocket Lab’s previous mission lifted off from Wallops Island, Virginia. That flight was a suborbital launch to support a hypersonic technology demonstration for the Defense Innovation Unit and the Missile Defense Agency. All told, Rocket Lab has now launched 18 Electron rockets this year with 100 percent mission success, a company record.

Spanish startup makes a big reveal. The Spanish company PLD Space released photos of a test version of its Miura 5 rocket Thursday, calling it a “decisive step forward in the orbital launcher validation campaign.” The full-scale qualification unit, called QM1, will allow engineers to complete subsystem testing under “real conditions” to ensure the rocket’s reliability before its first mission scheduled for 2026. The first stage of the qualification unit will undergo a full propellant loading test, while the second stage will undergo a destructive test in the United States to validate the rocket’s range safety destruct system. Miura 5 is designed to deliver a little more than a metric ton (2,200 pounds) of payload to low-Earth orbit.

Still a long way to go … “Presenting our first integrated Miura 5 unit is proof that our model works: vertical integration, proprietary infrastructure and a philosophy based on testing, learning, and improving,” said Raúl Torres, CEO and co-founder of PLD Space. The reveal, however, is just the first step in a qualification campaign that takes more than a year for most rocket companies. PLD Space aims to go much faster, with plans to complete a second qualification rocket by the end of December and unveil its first flight rocket in the first quarter of next year. “This unprecedented development cadence in Europe reinforces PLD Space’s position as the company that has developed an orbital launcher in the shortest time–just two years–whilst meeting the highest quality standards,” the company said in a statement. This would be a remarkable achievement, but history suggests PLD Space has a steep climb in the months ahead. (submitted by Leika and EllPeaTea)

Sweden digs deep in pursuit of sovereign launch. In an unsettled world, many nations are eager to develop homegrown rockets to place their own satellites into orbit. These up-and-coming spacefaring nations see it as a strategic imperative to break free from total reliance on space powers like Russia, China, and the United States. Still, some decisions are puzzling. This week, the Swedish aerospace and defense contractor Saab announced a $10 million investment in a company named Pythom. If you’re not familiar with this business, allow me to link back to a 2022 story published by Ars about Pythom’s questionable safety practices. The company has kept quiet since then, until the name surprisingly popped up again in a press release from Saab, a firm with a reputation that seems to be diametrically opposed to that of Pythom.

Just enough … The statement from Saab suggests its $10 million contribution to Pythom will make it the “lead investor” in the company’s recent funding round. Pythom hasn’t said anything more about this funding round, but Saab said the investment will accelerate Pythom’s “development and deployment of its launch systems,” which include an initial rocket capable of putting up to 330 pounds (150 kilograms) of payload into low-Earth orbit. $10 million may be just enough to keep Pythom afloat for a couple more years but is far less than the money Pythom would need to get serious about fielding an orbital launcher. Pythom is headquartered in California, but it has Swedish roots. It was founded by the Swedish married couple Tina and Tom Sjögren. The company has a couple dozen employees, and a handful of them are based in Sweden, according to Pythom’s website. (submitted by Leika and EllPeaTea)

China is about to launch an astronaut lifeboat. China is set to launch an uncrewed Shenzhou spacecraft to the Tiangong space station to provide the Shenzhou 21 astronauts with a means of returning home, Space News reports. The launch of China’s Shenzhou 22 mission is scheduled for Monday night, US time, aboard a Long March 2F rocket. Instead of carrying astronauts, the ship will ferry cargo to the Chinese Tiangong space station. More importantly, it will provide a safe ride home for the three astronauts living and working aboard the orbiting outpost.

How did we get here? … The Shenzhou 20 spacecraft currently docked to the Tiangong station was damaged by a suspected piece of space junk, cracking its window and rendering it unable to meet China’s safety standards for returning astronauts to Earth. The damage discovery occurred just before three outgoing crew members were supposed to ride Shenzhou 20 home earlier this month. Instead, those three astronauts departed the station and returned to Earth on the newer, undamaged Shenzhou 21 spacecraft. That left the other three crew members on Tiangong with only the damaged Shenzhou 20 spacecraft to get them home in the event of an emergency. Shenzhou 22 will replace Shenzhou 20, providing a lifeboat for the rest of the crew’s six-month stay in space. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Atlas V launches for Viasat. United Launch Alliance launched its Atlas V rocket on November 13 with a satellite for the California-based communications company Viasat, Spaceflight Now reports. The launch came a week after the mission was scrubbed due to a faulty liquid oxygen tank vent valve on the Atlas booster. ULA rolled the rocket back to the Vertical Integration Facility, replaced it with a new valve, and returned the rocket to the pad on November 12. The launch the following day was successful, with the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage deploying the ViaSat-3 F2 spacecraft into a geosynchronous transfer orbit nearly three-and-a-half hours after liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

End of an era … This was the final launch of an Atlas V rocket with a payload heading for geosynchronous orbit. These are the kinds of missions the Atlas V was designed for more than 25 years ago, but the market has changed. All of the Atlas V’s remaining 11 missions will target low-Earth orbit carrying broadband satellites for Amazon or Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft heading for the International Space Station. The Atlas V will be retired in the coming years in favor of ULA’s new Vulcan rocket.

SpaceX launches key climate change monitor. SpaceX launched a joint NASA-European environmental research satellite early Monday, the second in an ongoing billion-dollar project to measure long-term changes in sea level, a key indicator of climate change, CBS News reports. The first satellite, known as Sentinel-6 and named in honor of NASA climate researcher Michael Freilich, was launched in November 2020. The latest spacecraft, Sentinel-6B, was launched from California atop a Falcon 9 rocket this week. Both satellites are equipped with a sophisticated cloud-penetrating radar. By timing how long it takes beams to bounce back from the ocean 830 miles (1,336 kilometers) below, the Sentinel-6 satellites can track sea levels to an accuracy of about one inch while also measuring wave height and wind speeds. The project builds on earlier missions dating back to the early 1990s that have provided an uninterrupted stream of sea level data.

FAA restrictions lifted … The Federal Aviation Administration lifted a restriction on commercial space operations this week that limited launches and reentries to the late night and early morning hours, Spaceflight Now reports. The FAA imposed a daytime curfew on commercial launches as it struggled to maintain air traffic control during the recent government shutdown. Those restrictions, which did not affect government missions, were lifted Monday. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Blue Origin’s New Glenn will grow larger. One week after the successful second launch of its large New Glenn booster, Blue Origin revealed a road map on Thursday for upgrades to the rocket, including a new variant with more main engines and a super-heavy lift capability, Ars reports. These upgrades to the rocket are “designed to increase payload performance and launch cadence, while enhancing reliability,” the company said in an update published on its website. The enhancements will be phased in over time, starting with the third launch of New Glenn, which is likely to occur during the first half of 2026.

No timelines … The most significant part of the update concerned an evolution of New Glenn that will transform the booster into a super-heavy lift launch vehicle. The first stage of this evolved vehicle will have nine BE-4 engines instead of seven, and the upper stage will have four BE-3U engines instead of two. In its update, Blue Origin refers to the new vehicle as 9×4 and the current variant as 7×2, a reference to the number of engines in each stage. “New Glenn 9×4 is designed for a subset of missions requiring additional capacity and performance,” the company said. “The vehicle carries over 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, over 14 metric tons direct to geosynchronous orbit, and over 20 metric tons to trans-lunar injection. Additionally, the 9×4 vehicle will feature a larger 8.7-meter fairing.” The company did not specify a timeline for the debut of the 9×4 variant. A spokesperson for the company told Ars, “We aren’t disclosing a specific timeframe today. The iterative design from our current 7×2 vehicle means we can build this rocket quickly.”

Recently landed New Glenn returns to port. Blue Origin welcomed “Never Tell Me the Odds” back to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on Thursday, where the rocket booster launched exactly one week prior, Florida Today reports. The New Glenn’s first stage booster landed on Blue Origin’s offshore recovery barge, which returned it to Port Canaveral on Tuesday with great fanfare. Blue Origin’s founder, Jeff Bezos, rode the barge into port, posing for photos with the rocket and waving to onlookers viewing the spectacle from a nearby public pier. The rocket was lowered horizontally late Wednesday morning, as spectators watched alongside the restaurants and fishing boats at the port.

Through the gates … Officials from Blue Origin guided the 188-foot-long New Glenn booster to the Space Force station Thursday, making Blue Origin the only company besides SpaceX to return a space-flown booster through the gates. Once back at Blue Origin’s hangar, the rocket will undergo inspections and refurbishment for a second flight, perhaps early next year. “I could not be more excited to see the New Glenn launch, and Blue Origin recover that booster and bring it back,” Col. Brian Chatman, commander of Space Launch Delta 45, told Florida Today. “It’s all part of our certification process and campaign to certify more national security space launch providers, launch carriers, to get our most crucial satellites up on orbit.”

Meanwhile, down at Starbase. SpaceX rolled the first of its third-generation Super Heavy boosters out of the factory at Starbase, Texas, this week for a road trip to a nearby test site, according to NASASpaceflight.com. The booster rode SpaceX’s transporter from the factory a few miles down the road to Massey’s Test Site, where technicians prepared the rocket for cryogenic proof testing. However, during the initial phases of testing, the booster failed early on Friday morning.

Tumbling down … At the Starship launch site, ground teams are busy tearing down the launch mount at Pad 1, the departure point for all of SpaceX’s Starships to date. SpaceX will upgrade the pad for its next-generation, more powerful Super Heavy boosters, while Starship V3’s initial flights will take off from Pad 2, a few hundred meters away from Pad 1.

Next three launches

Nov. 22: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-79 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 06: 59 UTC

Nov. 23: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-30 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 08: 00 UTC

Nov. 25: Long March 2F | Shenzhou 22 | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 04: 11 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: SpaceX’s next-gen booster fails; Pegasus will fly again Read More »

Stoke Space goes for broke to solve the only launch problem that “moves the needle”

andy lapsa, cape canaveral, Features, nova rocket, Space, stoke space / Mike M. / November 21, 2025

“Does the world really need a 151st rocket company?”

Stoke Space’s full-flow staged combustion is tested in Central Washington in 2024. Credit: Stoke Space

LAUNCH COMPLEX 14, Cape Canaveral, Fla.—The platform atop the hulking steel tower offered a sweeping view of Florida’s rich, sandy coastline and brilliant blue waves beyond. Yet as captivating as the vista might be for an aspiring rocket magnate like Andy Lapsa, it also had to be a little intimidating.

To his right, at Launch Complex 13 next door, a recently returned Falcon 9 booster stood on a landing pad. SpaceX has landed more than 500 large orbital rockets. And next to SpaceX sprawled the launch site operated by Blue Origin. Its massive New Glenn rocket is also reusable, and founder Jeff Bezos has invested tens of billions of dollars into the venture.

Looking to the left, Lapsa saw a graveyard of sorts for commercial startups. Launch Complex 15 was leased to a promising startup, ABL Space, two years ago. After two failed launches, ABL Space pivoted away from commercial launch. Just beyond lies Launch Complex 16, where Relativity Space aims to launch from. The company has already burned through $4 billion in its efforts to reach orbit. Had billionaire Eric Schmidt not stepped in earlier this year, Relativity would have gone bankrupt.

Andy Lapsa may be a brainy rocket scientist, but he is not a billionaire. Far from it.

“When you start a company like this, you have no idea how far you’re going to be able to make it, you know?” he admitted.

Lapsa and another aerospace engineer, Tom Feldman, founded Stoke Space a little more than five years ago. Both had worked the better part of a decade at Blue Origin and decided they wanted to make their mark on the industry. It was not an easy choice to start a rocket company at a time when there were dozens of other entrants in the field.

Andy Lapsa speaks at the Space Economy Summit in November 2025. Credit: The Economist Group

“It was a huge question in my head: Does the world really need a 151st rocket company?” he said. “And in order for me to say yes to that question, I had to very systematically go through all the other players, thinking about the economics of launch, about the business plan, about the evolution of these companies over time. It was very non-intuitive to me to start another launch company.”

So why did he do it?

I traveled to Florida in November to answer this question and to see if the world’s 151st rocket company had any chance of success.

Launch Complex 14

It takes a long time to build a launch site. Probably longer than you might think.

Lapsa and Feldman spent much of 2020 working on the basic design of a rocket that would eventually be named Nova and deciding whether they could build a business around it. In December of that year, they closed their seed round of funding, raising $9.1 million. After this, finding somewhere to launch from became a priority.

They zeroed in on Cape Canaveral because it’s where the majority of US launch companies and customers are, as well as the talent to assemble and launch rockets. They learned in 2021 that the US Space Force was planning to lease an old pad, Space Launch Complex 14, to a commercial company. This was not just a good location to launch from; it was truly a historic location—John Glenn launched into orbit from here in 1962 aboard the Friendship 7 spacecraft. It was retired in 1967 and designated a National Historic Landmark.

But in recent years, the Space Force has sought to support the flourishing US commercial space industry, and it has offered Launch Complex 14. After the competition opened in 2021, Stoke Space won the lease a year later. Then began the long and arduous process of conducting an Environmental Assessment. It took nearly two years, and it was not until October 20, 2024, that Stoke was allowed to break ground.

None of the structures on the site were usable, and aside from the historic blockhouse dating to the Mercury program, everything else had to be demolished and cleared before work could begin.

As we walked the large ring encompassing the site, Lapsa explained that all of the tanks and major hardware needed to support a Nova launch were now on site. There is a large launch tower, as well as a launch mount upon which the rocket will be stood up. The company has mostly turned toward integrating all of the ground infrastructure and wiring up the site. A nearby building to assemble rockets and process payloads is well underway.

Lapsa seemed mostly relieved. “A year ago, this was my biggest concern,” he said.

He need not have worried. A few months before the company completed its environmental permitting, a tall, lanky, thickly bearded engineer named Jonathan Lund hired on. A Stanford graduate who got his start with the US Army Corps of Engineers, Lund worked at SpaceX during the second half of the 2010s, helping to lead the reconstruction of one launch pad, the crew tower project at Launch Complex 39A, and a pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base. He also worked on multiple landing sites for the Falcon 9 rocket. Lund arrived to lead the development of Stoke’s site.

This is Lund’s fifth launch pad. Each one presents different challenges. In Florida, for example, the water table lies only a few feet below the ground. But for most rockets, including Nova, a large trench must be dug to allow flames from the rocket engines to be carried away from the vehicle at ignition and liftoff. As we stood in this massive flame diverter, there were a few indications of water seeping in.

Still, the company recently completed a major milestone by testing the water suppression system, which dampens the energy of a rocket at liftoff to protect the launch pad. Essentially, the plume from the rocket’s engines flows downward where it meets a sheet of water, turning it into steam. This creates an insulating barrier of sorts.

Water suppression test at LC-14 complete. ✅ Flowed the diverter and rain birds in a “launch like” scenario. pic.twitter.com/rs1lEloPul

— Stoke Space (@stoke_space) October 21, 2025

The water comes from large pipes running down the flame diverter, each of which has hundreds of holes not unlike a garden sprinkler hose. Lund said the pipes and the frame they rest on were built near where we stood.

“We fabricated these pieces on site, at the north end of the flame trench,” Lund explained. “Then we built this frame in Cocoa Beach and shipped it in four different sections and assembled it on site. Then we set the frame on the ramp, put together this surface (with the pipes), and then Egyptian-style we slide it down the ramp right into position. We used some old-school methods, but simple sometimes works best. Nothing fancy.”

At this point, Lapsa interrupted. “I was pretty nervous,” he said. “The way you’re describing this sounded good on a PowerPoint. But I wasn’t sure it actually would work.”

But it did.

Waiting on Nova

So if the pad is rounding into shape, how’s that rocket coming?

It sounds like Stoke Space is doing the right things. Earlier this year, the company shipped a full-scale version of its second stage to its test site at Moses Lake in central Washington. There, it underwent qualification testing, during which the vehicle is loaded with cryogenic fuels on multiple occasions, pressurized, and put through other exercises. Lapsa said that testing went well.

The company also built a stubby version of its first stage. The tanks and domes had full-size diameters, but the stage was not its full height. That vehicle also underwent qualification testing and passed.

The company has begun building flight hardware for the first Nova rocket. The vehicle’s software is maturing. Work is well underway on the development of an automated flight termination system. “Having a team that’s been through this cycle many times, it’s something we started putting attention on very early,” Lapsa said. “It’s on a good path as well.”

And yet the final, frenetic months leading to a debut launch are crunch time for any rocket company: first assembly of the full vehicle, first time test-firing it all. Things will inevitably go wrong. The question is how bad will the problems be?

For as long as I’ve known Lapsa, he has been cagey about launch dates for Stoke. This is smart because in reality, no one knows. And seasoned industry people (and journalists) know that projected launch dates for new rockets are squishy. The most precise thing Lapsa will say is that Stoke is targeting “next year” for Nova’s debut.

The company has a customer for the first flight. If all goes well, its first mission will sail to the asteroid belt. Asteroid mining startup AstroForge has signed on for Nova 1.

Stoke Space isn’t shooting for the Moon. It’s shooting for something 1 million times farther.

Too good to believe it’s true?

Stoke Space is far from the first company to start with grand ambitions. And when rocket startups think too big, it can be their undoing.

A little more than a decade ago, Firefly Space Systems in Texas based the design of its Alpha rocket on an aerospike engine, a technology that had never been flown to space before. Although this was theoretically a more efficient engine design, it also brought more technical risk and proved a bridge too far. By 2017, the company was bankrupt. When Ukrainian investor Max Polyakov rescued Firefly later that year, he demanded that Alpha have a more conventional rocket engine design.

Around the same time that Firefly struggled with its aerospike engine, another launch company, Relativity Space, announced its intent to 3D-print the entirety of its rockets. The company finally launched its Terran 1 rocket after eight years. But it struggled with additively manufacturing rockets. Relativity was on the brink of bankruptcy before a former Google executive, Eric Schmidt, stepped in to rescue the company financially. Relativity is now focused on a traditionally manufactured rocket, the Terran R.

Stoke Space’s Hopper 2 takes to the skies in September 2023 in Moses Lake, Washington. Credit: Stoke Space

So what to make of Stoke Space, which has an utterly novel design for its second stage? The stage is powered by a ring of 24 thrusters, an engine collectively named Andromeda. Stoke has also eschewed a tile-based heat shield to protect the vehicle during atmospheric reentry in favor of a regeneratively cooled design.

In this, there are echoes of Firefly, Relativity, and other companies with grand plans that had to be abandoned in favor of simpler designs to avoid financial ruin. After all, it’s hard enough to reach orbit with a conventional rocket.

But the company has already done a lot of testing of this design. Its first iteration of Andromeda even completed a hop test back in 2023.

“Andromeda is wildly new,” Lapsa said. “But the question of can it work, in my opinion, is a resounding yes.”

The engineering team had all manner of questions when designing Andromeda several years ago. How will all of those thrusters and their plumbing interact with one another? Will there be feedback? Is the heat shield idea practical?

“Those are the kind of unknowns that we knew we were walking into from an engineering perspective,” Lapsa said. “We knew there should be an answer in there, but we didn’t know exactly what it would be. It’s very hard to model all that stuff in the transient. So you just had to get after it, and do it, and we were able to do that. So can it work? Absolutely yes. Will it work out of the box? That’s a different question.”

First stage, too

Stoke’s ambitions did not stop with the upper stage. Early on, Lapsa, Feldman, and the small engineering team also decided to develop a full-flow staged combustion engine. This, Lapsa acknowledges, was a “risky” decision for the company. But it was a necessary one, he believes.

Full-flow staged combustion engines had been tested before this decade but were never flown. From an engineering standpoint, they are significantly more complex than a traditional staged combustion engine in that the oxidizer and propellant—which began as cryogenic liquids—arrive in the combustion chamber in a fully gaseous state. This interaction between two gases is more efficient and produces less wear and tear on turbines within the engine.

“You want to get the highest efficiency you can without driving the turbine temperature to a place where you have a short lifetime,” Lapsa said. “Full-flow is the right answer for that. If you do anything else, it’s a distraction.”

Stoke Space successfully tests its advanced full-flow staged combustion rocket engine, designed to power the Nova launch vehicle’s first stage. Credit: Stoke Space

It was also massively unproven. When Stoke Space was founded in 2020, no full-flow staged combustion engine had ever gotten close to space. SpaceX was developing the Raptor engine using the technology, but it would not make its first “spaceflight” until the spring of 2023 on the Super Heavy rocket that powers Starship. Multiple Raptors failed shortly after ignition.

But for a company choosing full reusability of its rocket, as SpaceX sought to do with Starship, there ultimately is no choice.

“Anything you build for full and rapid reuse needs to find margin somewhere in the system,” Lapsa said. “And really that’s fuel efficiency. It makes fuel efficiency a very strong, very important driver.”

In June 2024, Stoke Space announced it had just completed a successful hot fire test of its full-flow, staged combustion engine for Nova’s first stage. The propulsion team had, Lapsa said at the time, “worked tirelessly” to reach that point.

Not just another launch company?

Stoke Space got to the party late. After SpaceX’s success with the first Falcon 9 in 2010, a wave of new entrants entered the field over the next decade. They were drawing down billions in venture capital funding, and some were starting to go public at huge valuations as special purpose acquisition companies. But by 2020, the market seemed saturated. The gold rush for new launch companies was nearing the cops-arrive-to-bust-up-the-festivities stage.

Every new company seemed to have its own spin on how to conquer low-Earth orbit.

“There were a lot of other business plans being proposed and tried,” Lapsa said. “There were low-cost, mass-produced disposable rockets. There were rockets under the wings of aircraft. There were rocket engine companies that were going to sell to 150 launch companies. All of those ideas raised big money and deserve to be considered. The question is, which one is the winner in the end?”

And that’s the question he was trying to answer in his own mind. He was in his 30s. He had a family. And he was looking to commit his best years, professionally, to solving a major launch problem.

“What’s the thing that fundamentally moves the needle on what’s out there already today?” he said. “The only thing, in my opinion, is rapid reuse. And once you get it, the economics are so powerful that nothing else matters. That’s the thing I couldn’t get out of my head. That’s the only problem I wanted to work on, and so we started a company in order to work on it.”

Stoke was one of many launch companies five years ago. But in the years since, the field has narrowed considerably. Some promising companies, such as Virgin Orbit and ABL Space, launched a few times and folded. Others never made it to the launch pad. Today, by my count, there are fewer than 10 serious commercial launch companies in the United States, Stoke among them. The capital markets seem convinced. In October, Stoke announced a massive $510 million Series D funding round. That was a lot of money in a challenging time to raise launch firm funding.

So Stoke has the money it needs. It has a team of sharp engineers and capable technicians. It has a launch pad and qualified hardware. That’s all good because this is the point in the journey for a launch startup where things start to get very, very difficult.

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.

Stoke Space goes for broke to solve the only launch problem that “moves the needle” Read More »

Trump revives unpopular Ted Cruz plan to punish states that impose AI laws

AI, Policy, state AI laws, Trump / Mike M. / November 20, 2025

The FTC chairman would be required to issue a policy statement detailing “circumstances under which State laws that require alterations to the truthful outputs of AI models are preempted by the FTC Act’s prohibition on engaging in deceptive acts or practices affecting commerce.”

When Cruz proposed a moratorium restricting state AI regulation in mid-2025, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) helped lead the fight against it. “Until Congress passes federally preemptive legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act and an online privacy framework, we can’t block states from making laws that protect their citizens,” Blackburn said at the time.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) also spoke out against the Cruz plan, saying it would preempt “good state consumer protection laws” related to robocalls, deepfakes, and autonomous vehicles.

Trump wants Congress to preempt state laws

Besides reviving the Cruz plan, Trump’s draft executive order seeks new legislation to preempt state laws. The order would direct Trump administration officials to “jointly prepare for my review a legislative recommendation establishing a uniform Federal regulatory framework for AI that preempts State AI laws that conflict with the policy set forth in this order.”

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) this week said a ban on state AI laws could be included in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Democrats are trying to keep the ban out of the bill.

“We have to allow states to take the lead because we’re not able to, so far in Washington, come up with appropriate legislation,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the ranking member on the Armed Services Committee, told Semafor.

In a Truth Social post on Tuesday, Trump claimed that states are “trying to embed DEI ideology into AI models.” Trump wrote, “We MUST have one Federal Standard instead of a patchwork of 50 State Regulatory Regimes. If we don’t, then China will easily catch us in the AI race. Put it in the NDAA, or pass a separate Bill, and nobody will ever be able to compete with America.”

Trump revives unpopular Ted Cruz plan to punish states that impose AI laws Read More »

Google’s new Nano Banana Pro uses Gemini 3 power to generate more realistic AI images

AI, AI image generation, Google, Google Gemini, Tech / Mike M. / November 20, 2025

Detecting less sloppy slop

Google is not just blowing smoke—the new image generator is much better. Its grasp of the world and the nuance of language is apparent, producing much more realistic results. Even before this, AI images were getting so good that it could be hard to spot them at a glance. Gone are the days when you could just count fingers to identify AI. Google is making an effort to help identify AI content, though.

Images generated with Nano Banana Pro continue to have embedded SynthID watermarks that Google’s tools can detect. The company is also adding more C2PA metadata to further label AI images. The Gemini app is part of this effort, too. Starting now, you can upload an image and ask something like “Is this AI?” The app won’t detect just any old AI image, but it will tell you if it’s a product of Google AI by checking for SynthID.

Gemini can now detect its own AI images.

At the same time, Google is making it slightly harder for people to know an image was generated with AI. Operating with the knowledge that professionals may want to generate images with Nano Banana Pro, Google has removed the visible watermark from images for AI Ultra subscribers. These images still have SynthID, but only the lower tiers have the Gemini twinkle in the corner.

While everyone can access the new Nano Banana Pro today, AI Ultra subscribers will enjoy the highest usage limits. Gemini Pro users will get a bit less access, and free users will get the lowest limits before being booted down to the non-pro version.

Google’s new Nano Banana Pro uses Gemini 3 power to generate more realistic AI images Read More »

Testing shows Apple N1 Wi-Fi chip improves on older Broadcom chips in every way

Apple, IPhone, iphone 17, iphone 17 pro, iphone air, Tech / Mike M. / November 19, 2025

This year’s newest iPhones included one momentous change that marked a new phase in the evolution of Apple Silicon: the Apple N1, Apple’s first in-house chip made to handle local wireless connections. The N1 supports Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and the Thread smart home communication protocol, and it replaces the third-party wireless chips (mostly made by Broadcom) that Apple used in older iPhones.

Apple claimed that the N1 would enable more reliable connectivity for local communication features like AirPlay and AirDrop but didn’t say anything about how users could expect it to perform. But Ookla, the folks behind the SpeedTest app and website, have analyzed about five weeks’ worth of users’ testing data to get an idea of how the iPhone 17 lineup stacks up to the iPhone 16, as well as Android phones with Wi-Fi chips from Qualcomm, MediaTek, and others.

While the N1 isn’t at the top of the charts, Ookla says Apple’s Wi-Fi chip “delivered higher download and upload speeds on Wi-Fi compared to the iPhone 16 across every studied percentile and virtually every region.” The median download speed for the iPhone 17 series was 329.56Mbps, compared to 236.46Mbps for the iPhone 16; the upload speed also jumped from 73.68Mbps to 103.26Mbps.

Ookla noted that the N1’s best performance seemed to improve scores most of all in the bottom 10th percentile of performance tests, “implying Apple’s custom silicon lifts the floor more than the ceiling.” The iPhone 17 also didn’t top Ookla’s global performance charts—Ookla found that the Pixel 10 Pro series slightly edges out the iPhone 17 in download speed, while a Xiaomi 15T Pro with MediaTek Wi-Fi silicon featured better upload speeds.

Testing shows Apple N1 Wi-Fi chip improves on older Broadcom chips in every way Read More »

Meta wins monopoly trial, convinces judge that social networking is dead

Antitrust law, facebook, federal trade commission, Instagram, Meta, monopoly, Policy, reels, tiktok, whatsapp, youtube / Mike M. / November 19, 2025

People are “bored” by their friends’ content, judge ruled, siding with Meta.

Mark Zuckerberg arrives at court after The Federal Trade Commission alleged the acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 gave Meta a social media monopoly. Credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg

After years of pushback from the Federal Trade Commission over Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, Meta has defeated the FTC’s monopoly claims.

In a Tuesday ruling, US District Judge James Boasberg said the FTC failed to show that Meta has a monopoly in a market dubbed “personal social networking.” In that narrowly defined market, the FTC unsuccessfully argued, Meta supposedly faces only two rivals, Snapchat and MeWe, which struggle to compete due to its alleged monopoly.

But the days of grouping apps into “separate markets of social networking and social media” are over, Boasberg wrote. He cited the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who “posited that no man can ever step into the same river twice,” while telling the FTC they missed their chance to block Meta’s purchase.

Essentially, Boasberg agreed with Meta that social media—as it was known in Facebook’s early days—is dead. And that means that Meta now competes with a broader set of rival apps, which includes two hugely popular platforms: TikTok and YouTube.

“When the evidence implies that consumers are reallocating massive amounts of time from Meta’s apps to these rivals and that the amount of substitution has forced Meta to invest gobs of cash to keep up, the answer is clear: Meta is not a monopolist insulated from competition,” Boasberg wrote.

In fact, adding just TikTok alone to the market defeated the FTC’s claims, Boasberg wrote, leaving him to conclude that “Meta holds no monopoly in the relevant market.”

The FTC is not happy about the loss, which comes after Boasberg determined that one of the agency’s key expert witnesses, Scott Hemphill, could not have approached his testimony “with an open mind.” According to Boasberg, Hemphill was aligned with figures publicly calling for the breakup of Facebook, and that made “neutral evaluation of his opinions more difficult” in a case with little direct evidence of monopoly harms.

“We are deeply disappointed in this decision,” Joe Simonson, the FTC’s director of public affairs, told CNBC. “The deck was always stacked against us with Judge Boasberg, who is currently facing articles of impeachment. We are reviewing all our options.”

For Meta, the win ends years of FTC fights intended to break up the company’s family of apps: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

“The Court’s decision today recognizes that Meta faces fierce competition,” Jennifer Newstead, Meta’s chief legal officer, said. “Our products are beneficial for people and businesses and exemplify American innovation and economic growth. We look forward to continuing to partner with the Administration and to invest in America.”

Reels’ popularity helped save Meta

Meta app users clicking on Reels helped Meta win.

Boasberg noted that “a majority of Americans’ time” on both Facebook and Instagram “is now spent watching videos,” with Reels becoming “the single most-used part of Facebook.” That puts Meta apps more on par with entertainment apps like TikTok and YouTube, the judge said.

While “connecting with friends remains an important part of both apps,” the judge cited Meta’s evidence showing that Meta had to pump more recommended content from strangers into users’ feeds to account for a trend where its users grew increasingly less inclined to post publicly.

“Both scrolling and sharing have transformed” since Facebook was founded, Boasberg wrote, citing six factors that he concluded invalidated the FTC’s market definition as markets exist today.

Initial factors that shifted markets were due to leaps in innovation. “First, smartphone usage exploded,” Boasberg explained, then “cell phone data got better,” which made it easier to watch videos without frustrating “freezing and buffering.” Soon after, content recommendation systems got better, with “advanced AI algorithms” helping users “find engaging videos about the things” they “care most about in the world.”

Other factors stemmed from social changes, the judge suggested, describing the fourth factor as a trend where Meta app users started feeling “increasingly bored by their friends’ posts.”

“Longtime users’ friend lists” start fresh, but over time, they “become an often-outdated archive of people they once knew: a casual friend from college, a long-ago friend from summer camp, some guy they met at a party once,” Boasberg wrote. “Posts from friends have therefore grown less interesting.”

Then came TikTok, the fifth factor, Boasberg said, which forced Meta to “evolve” Facebook and Instagram by adding Reels.

And finally, “those five changes both caused and were reinforced by a change in social norms, which evolved to discourage public posting,” Boasberg wrote. “People have increasingly become less interested in blasting out public posts that hundreds of others can see.”

As a result of these tech advancements and social trends, Boasberg said, “Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have thus evolved to have nearly identical main features.” That reality undermined the FTC’s claims that users preferred Facebook and Instagram before Meta shifted its focus away from friends-and-family content.

“The Court simply does not find it credible that users would prefer the Facebook and Instagram apps that existed ten years ago to the versions that exist today,” Boasberg wrote.

Meta apps have not deteriorated, judge ruled

Boasberg repeatedly emphasized that the FTC failed to prove that Meta has a monopoly “now,” either actively or imminently causing harms.

The FTC tried to win by claiming that “Meta has degraded its apps’ quality by increasing their ad load, that falling user sentiment shows that the apps have deteriorated and that Meta has sabotaged its apps by underinvesting in friend sharing,” Boasberg noted.

But, Boasberg said, the FTC failed to show that Meta’s app quality has diminished—a trend that Cory Doctorow dubbed “enshittification,” which Meta apparently successfully argued is not real.

The judge was also swayed by Meta’s arguments that users like seeing ads. Meta showed evidence that it can only profitably increase its ad load when ad quality improves; otherwise, it risks losing engagement. Because “the rate at which users buy something or subscribe to a service based on Meta’s ads has steadily risen,” this suggested “that the ads have gotten more and more likely to connect users to products in which they have an interest,” Boasberg said.

Additionally, surveys of Meta app users that show declining user sentiment are not evidence that its apps are deteriorating in quality, Boasberg said, but are more about “brand reputation.”

“That is unsurprising: ask people how they feel about, say, Exxon Mobil, and their answers will tell you very little about how good its oil is,” Boasberg wrote. “The FTC’s claim that worsening sentiment shows a worsening product is unpersuasive.”

Finally, the FTC’s claim that Meta underinvested in friends-and-family content, to the detriment of its core app users, “makes no sense,” Boasberg wrote, given Meta’s data showing that user posting declined.

“While it is true that users see less content from their friends these days, that is largely due to the friends themselves: people simply post less,” Boasberg wrote. “Users are not seeing less friend content because Meta is hiding it from them, but instead because there is less friend content for Meta to show.”

It’s not even “clear that users want more friend posts,” the judge noted, agreeing with Meta that “instead, what users really seem to want is Reels.”

Further, if Meta were a monopolist, Boasberg seemed to suggest that the platform might be more invested in forcing friends-and-family content than Reels, since “Reels earns Meta less money” due to its smaller ad load.

“Courts presume that sophisticated corporations act rationally,” Boasberg wrote. “Here, the FTC has not offered even an ordinarily persuasive case that Meta is making the economically irrational choice to underinvest in its most lucrative offerings. It certainly has not made a particularly persuasive one.”

Among the critics unhappy with the ruling is Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, who suggested that Boasberg’s ruling was “a colossally wrong decision” that “turns a willful blind eye to Meta’s enormous power over social media and the harms that flow from it.”

“Judge Boasberg has purposefully ignored the overwhelming evidence of how Meta became a monopoly—not by building a better product, but by buying its rivals to shut down any real competitors before they could grow,” Hegde said. “These deals let Meta fuse Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp into one machine that poisons our children and discourse, bullies publishers and advertisers, and destroys the possibility of healthy online connections with friends and family. By pretending that TikTok’s rise wipes away over a decade of illegal conduct, this court has effectively told every aspiring monopolist that our current justice system is on their side.”

On the other side, industry groups cheered the ruling. Matt Schruers, president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, suggested that Boasberg concluded “what every Internet user knows—that Meta competes with a number of platforms and the company’s relevant market shares are therefore nowhere close to those required to establish monopoly power.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Meta wins monopoly trial, convinces judge that social networking is dead Read More »

Microsoft tries to head off the “novel security risks” of Windows 11 AI agents

AI, copilot, microsoft, Tech, Windows 11, windows 11 25h2 / Mike M. / November 18, 2025

Microsoft has been adding AI features to Windows 11 for years, but things have recently entered a new phase, with both generative and so-called “agentic” AI features working their way deeper into the bedrock of the operating system. A new build of Windows 11 released to Windows Insider Program testers yesterday includes a new “experimental agentic features” toggle in the Settings to support a feature called Copilot Actions, and Microsoft has published a detailed support article detailing more about just how those “experimental agentic features” will work.

If you’re not familiar, “agentic” is a buzzword that Microsoft has used repeatedly to describe its future ambitions for Windows 11—in plainer language, these agents are meant to accomplish assigned tasks in the background, allowing the user’s attention to be turned elsewhere. Microsoft says it wants agents to be capable of “everyday tasks like organizing files, scheduling meetings, or sending emails,” and that Copilot Actions should give you “an active digital collaborator that can carry out complex tasks for you to enhance efficiency and productivity.”

But like other kinds of AI, these agents can be prone to error and confabulations and will often proceed as if they know what they’re doing even when they don’t. They also present, in Microsoft’s own words, “novel security risks,” mostly related to what can happen if an attacker is able to give instructions to one of these agents. As a result, Microsoft’s implementation walks a tightrope between giving these agents access to your files and cordoning them off from the rest of the system.

Possible risks and attempted fixes

For now, these “experimental agentic features” are optional, only available in early test builds of Windows 11, and off by default. Credit: Microsoft

For example, AI agents running on a PC will be given their own user accounts separate from your personal account, ensuring that they don’t have permission to change everything on the system and giving them their own “desktop” to work with that won’t interfere with what you’re working with on your screen. Users need to approve requests for their data, and “all actions of an agent are observable and distinguishable from those taken by a user.” Microsoft also says agents need to be able to produce logs of their activities and “should provide a means to supervise their activities,” including showing users a list of actions they’ll take to accomplish a multi-step task.

Microsoft tries to head off the “novel security risks” of Windows 11 AI agents Read More »

Ryan Gosling must save dying stars in Project Hail Mary trailer

amazon mgm studios, andy weir, culture, Entertainment, film trailers, Trailers / Mike M. / November 18, 2025

The big holiday releases are still waiting in the wings, but it’s not too soon to look forward to what’s coming in 2026. Amazon MGM Studios has released a new trailer for its forthcoming space odyssey Project Hail Mary, which is based on Andy Weir’s (The Martian) bestselling 2021 novel about an amnesiac biologist-turned-schoolteacher in space.

Weir told The New York Times that the inspiration for his novel came from a planned multi-book space opera called Zhek that he began writing after The Martian, about a potential fuel for interstellar travel. He eventually abandoned that effort and wrote the 2017 novel, Artemis, instead, but aspects of Zhek found their way into the Project Hail Mary novel.

As we’ve previously reported, Amazon MGM Studios acquired the rights for Weir’s novel before it was even published and brought on Drew Goddard to write the screenplay. (Goddard also wrote the adapted screenplay for The Martian, so he’s an excellent choice.) The studio tapped Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The LEGO Movie) to direct and signed on Ryan Gosling to star. Per the official premise:

Science teacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up on a spaceship light years from home with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. As his memory returns, he begins to uncover his mission: solve the riddle of the mysterious substance causing the sun to die out. He must call on his scientific knowledge and unorthodox ideas to save everything on Earth from extinction… but an unexpected friendship means he may not have to do it alone.

In addition to Gosling, the cast includes Sandra Huller as head of the Hail Mary project and Ryland’s superior; Milana Vayntrub as project astronaut Olesya Ilyukhina; Ken Leung as project astronaut Yao Li-Jie; Liz Kingsman as Shapiro; Orion Lee as Xi; and James Ortiz as a new life form Ryland names Rocky.

Ryan Gosling must save dying stars in Project Hail Mary trailer Read More »

Widespread Cloudflare outage blamed on mysterious traffic spike

cloud services, cloudflare, outage, Policy / Mike M. / November 18, 2025

About 20 percent of the web relies on Cloudflare to manage and protect traffic, a Cloudflare blog noted in July. Some intermediate fixes have been made, Cloudflare’s status page said. But as of this writing, many sites remain down. According to DownDetector, Amazon, Spotify, Zoom, Uber, and Azure also experienced outages.

“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” Cloudflare’s spokesperson said. “We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today’s incident and improve.”

Cloudflare will continue to update the status page as fixes come in, and a blog will be posted later today discussing the issue, the spokesperson told Ars.

It’s the latest massive outage site owners have coped with after an Amazon Web Services outage took out half the web last month. Both the AWS outage and the chaotic CrowdStrike outage last year were estimated to cost affected parties billions.

Critics have suggested that outages like these make it clear how fragile the Internet really is, especially when everyone relies on the same service providers. During the AWS outage, some sites considered diversifying service providers to avoid losing business during future outages.

The outage may have caused some investors to panic, as Cloudflare’s stock fell about 3 percent amid the widespread outage.

Ars will update this story when Cloudflare provides more information on the outage.

This story was updated on November 18 to add new information from Cloudflare.

Widespread Cloudflare outage blamed on mysterious traffic spike Read More »

With a new company, Jeff Bezos will become a CEO again

AI, Amazon, blue origin, Jeff Bezos, project prometheus, Tech / Mike M. / November 18, 2025

Jeff Bezos is one of the world’s richest and most famous tech CEOs, but he hasn’t actually been a CEO of anything since 2021. That’s now changing as he takes on the role of co-CEO of a new AI company, according to a New York Times report citing three people familiar with the company.

Grandiosely named Project Prometheus (and not to be confused with the NASA project of the same name), the company will focus on using AI to pursue breakthroughs in research, engineering, manufacturing, and other fields that are dubbed part of “the physical economy”—in contrast to the software applications that are likely the first thing most people in the general public think of when they hear “AI.”

Bezos’ co-CEO will be Vik Bajaj, a chemist and physicist who previously led life sciences work at Google X, an Alphabet-backed research group that worked on speculative projects that could lead to more product categories. (For example, it developed technologies that would later underpin Google’s Waymo service.) Bajaj also worked at Verily, another Alphabet-backed research group focused on life sciences, and Foresite Labs, an incubator for new AI companies.

With a new company, Jeff Bezos will become a CEO again Read More »

Author name: Mike M.