Mike M. – Page 8

Supreme Court upholds Texas porn law that caused Pornhub to leave the state

Policy, porn, Supreme Court, texas / Mike M. / June 28, 2025

Justice Elena Kagan filed a dissenting opinion that was joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Kagan said that in similar cases, the court applied strict scrutiny, “a highly rigorous but not fatal form of constitutional review, to laws regulating protected speech based on its content.”

“Texas’s law defines speech by content and tells people entitled to view that speech that they must incur a cost to do so,” Kagan wrote. “That is, under our First Amendment law, a direct (not incidental) regulation of speech based on its content—which demands strict scrutiny.”

The Texas law applies to websites in which more than one-third of the content “is sexual material harmful to minors.” Kagan described the law’s ID requirement as a deterrent to exercising one’s First Amendment rights.

“It is turning over information about yourself and your viewing habits—respecting speech many find repulsive—to a website operator, and then to… who knows? The operator might sell the information; the operator might be hacked or subpoenaed,” Kagan’s dissent said. The law requires website users to verify their ages by submitting “a ‘government-issued identification’ like a driver’s license or ‘transactional data’ associated with things like a job or mortgage,” Kagan wrote.

Limiting no more speech than necessary

Under strict scrutiny, the court must ask whether the law is “the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling state interest,” Kagan wrote. A state facing that standard must show it has limited no more adult speech than is necessary to achieve its goal.

“Texas can of course take measures to prevent minors from viewing obscene-for-children speech. But if a scheme other than H. B. 1181 can just as well accomplish that objective and better protect adults’ First Amendment freedoms, then Texas should have to adopt it (or at least demonstrate some good reason not to),” Kagan wrote.

The majority decision said that applying strict scrutiny “would call into question all age-verification requirements, even longstanding in-person requirements.” It also said the previous rulings cited in the dissent “all involved laws that banned both minors and adults from accessing speech that was at most obscene only to minors. The Court has never before considered whether the more modest burden of an age-verification requirement triggers strict scrutiny.”

Supreme Court upholds Texas porn law that caused Pornhub to leave the state Read More »

Stung by customer losses, Comcast says all its new plans have unlimited data

Comcast, data caps, Policy / Mike M. / June 27, 2025

The five-year guarantee would be a better deal in the long run because of the rise in price once the deal wears off. Comcast’s “everyday prices” for these plans range from $70 to $130 a month. Comcast said the one- and five-year guarantees are “available with no contracts” and that “all plans include a line of Xfinity Mobile at no additional cost for a year.”

Comcast exec: “We are not winning”

The Comcast data caps and their associated overage fees for exceeding the monthly limit have long been a major frustration for customers. Comcast has enforced the cap (currently 1.2TB a month) in most of its territory, but not in its Northeast markets where it faces competition from Verizon FiOS.

Comcast recently started offering five-year price guarantees and said it would continue adding more customer-friendly plans because of its recent struggles. After reporting a net loss of 183,000 residential broadband customers in Q1 2025, Comcast President Mike Cavanagh said during an April earnings call that “in this intensely competitive environment, we are not winning in the marketplace in a way that is commensurate with the strength of [our] network and connectivity products.”

Cavanagh said Comcast executives “identified two primary causes. One is price transparency and predictability and the other is the level of ease of doing business with us.” He said Comcast planned to simplify “our pricing construct to make our price-to-value proposition clearer to consumers across all broadband segments” and to make these changes “with the highest urgency.”

Even after the recent customer loss, Comcast had 29.19 million residential Internet customers.

Stung by customer losses, Comcast says all its new plans have unlimited data Read More »

Apple gives EU users App Store options in attempt to avoid massive fines

App Store, Apple, dma, EU, syndication, Tech / Mike M. / June 27, 2025

Apple is changing its App Store policies in the EU in a last-minute attempt to avoid a series of escalating fines from Brussels.

The $3 trillion iPhone maker will allow developers in the bloc to offer apps designed for the iOS operating system in places other than Apple’s App Store, the company said.

Apple has been negotiating for two months with the European Commission after being fined €500 million for breaching the EU’s Digital Markets Act, the landmark legislation designed to curtail the power of Big Tech groups.

Throughout the process, Apple has accused the commission of moving the goalposts on what the company needs to do to comply with the EU’s digital rule book.

Apple announced the measures on Thursday, the deadline for the company to comply with the bloc’s rules in order to avoid new levies. The financial penalties can escalate over time and reach up to 5 percent of average daily worldwide revenue.

Still, an Apple spokesperson said that “the European Commission is requiring Apple to make a series of additional changes to the App Store. We disagree with this outcome and plan to appeal.”

In a reaction to the changes, a European Commission spokesperson said that “the commission will now assess these new business terms for DMA compliance.”

The spokesperson added that “the commission considers it particularly important to obtain the views of market operators and interested third parties before deciding on next steps.”

The decision on the new fines under the Digital Markets Act comes as Brussels and Washington near a July 9 deadline to agree on a trade deal.

The EU’s rules on Big Tech are a flashpoint between Brussels and US President Donald Trump. But commission leaders have indicated they would not change their rule book as a part of trade negotiations with the US.

Apple gives EU users App Store options in attempt to avoid massive fines Read More »

Google’s spotty Find Hub network could get better thanks to a small setup tweak

android, bluetooth trackers, Google, Tech / Mike M. / June 26, 2025

Bluetooth trackers have existed for quite a while, but Apple made them worthwhile when it enlisted every iPhone to support AirTags. The tracking was so reliable that Apple had to add anti-stalking features. And although there are just as many Android phones out there, Google’s version of mobile device tracking, known as Find Hub, has been comparatively spotty. Now, Google is about to offer users a choice that could fix Bluetooth tracking on Android.

According to a report from Android Authority, Google is preparing to add a new screen to the Android setup process. This change, integrated with Play Services version 25.24, has yet to roll out widely, but it will allow anyone setting up an Android phone to choose a more effective method of tracking that will bolster Google’s network. This is included in the Play Services changelog as, “You can now configure Find Hub when setting up your phone, allowing the device to be located remotely.”

Trackable devices like AirTags and earbuds work by broadcasting a Bluetooth LE identifier, which phones in the area can see. Our always-online smartphones then report the approximate location of that signal, and with enough reports, the owner can pinpoint the tag. Perhaps wary of the privacy implications, Google rolled out its Find Hub network (previously Find My Device) with harsh restrictions on where device finding would work.

By default, Find Hub only works in busy areas where multiple phones can contribute to narrowing down the location. That’s suboptimal if you actually want to find things. The setting to allow finding in all areas is buried several menus deep in the system settings where no one is going to see it. Currently, the settings for Find Hub are under the security menu of your phone, but the patch may vary from one device to the next. For Pixels, it’s under Security > Device finders > Find Hub > Find your offline devices. Yeah, not exactly discoverable.

Google’s spotty Find Hub network could get better thanks to a small setup tweak Read More »

Gemini CLI is a free, open source coding agent that brings AI to your terminal

AI, Gemini, Google, Google Gemini, Tech, Terminal, vibe coding / Mike M. / June 25, 2025

Some developers prefer to live in the command line interface (CLI), eschewing the flashy graphics and file management features of IDEs. Google’s latest AI tool is for those terminal lovers. It’s called Gemini CLI, and it shares a lot with Gemini Code Assist, but it works in your terminal environment instead of integrating with an IDE. And perhaps best of all, it’s free and open source.

Gemini CLI plugs into Gemini 2.5 Pro, Google’s most advanced model for coding and simulated reasoning. It can create and modify code for you right inside the terminal, but you can also call on other Google models to generate images or videos without leaving the security of your terminal cocoon. It’s essentially vibe coding from the command line.

This tool is fully open source, so developers can inspect the code and help to improve it. The openness extends to how you configure the AI agent. It supports Model Context Protocol (MCP) and bundled extensions, allowing you to customize your terminal as you see fit. You can even include your own system prompts—Gemini CLI relies on GEMINI.md files, which you can use to tweak the model for different tasks or teams.

Now that Gemini 2.5 Pro is generally available, Gemini Code Assist has been upgraded to use the same technology as Gemini CLI. Code Assist integrates with IDEs like VS Code for those times when you need a more feature-rich environment. The new agent mode in Code Assist allows you to give the AI more general instructions, like “Add support for dark mode to my application” or “Build my project and fix any errors.”

Gemini CLI is a free, open source coding agent that brings AI to your terminal Read More »

Discovery of HMS Endeavour wreck confirmed

HMS Endeavour, maritime archaeology, maritime history, Science, shipwrecks / Mike M. / June 25, 2025

By 2016, RIMAP’s volunteers, operating on grants and private donations, had located 10 of the 13 wrecks, almost exactly where historical charts said they should be. And the search had gotten a boost from the 1998 discovery of a 200-year-old paper trail linking the troop transport Lord Sandwich to its former life as HMS Endeavour.

Narrowing the field

One candidate was found just 500 meters off the coast of Rhode Island (designated RI 2394), 14 meters below the surface and buried in nearly 250 years’ worth of sediment and silt. RIMAP’s team concluded in 2018 that this was likely the wreck of the Endeavour, although the researchers emphasized that they needed to accumulate more evidence to support their conclusions. That’s because only about 15 percent of the ship survived. Any parts of the hull that weren’t quickly buried by silt have long since decomposed in the water.

The ANMN felt confident enough in its own research by 2022 to hold that controversial news conference announcing the discovery, against RIMAP’s objections. But the evidence is now strong enough for RIMAP to reach the same conclusion. “In 1999 and again in 2019, RIMAP and ANMM agreed on a set of criteria that, if satisfied, would permit identification of RI 2394 as Lord Sandwich,” the authors wrote in the report’s introduction. “Based on the agreed preponderance of evidence approach, enough of these criteria have now been met… to positively identify RI 2394 as the remnants of Lord Sandwich, formerly James Cook’s HM Bark Endeavour. “

The Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission and the ANMM are now collaborating to ensure that the wreck site is protected in the future.

Discovery of HMS Endeavour wreck confirmed Read More »

Media Matters sues FTC, says agency is retaliating on behalf of Elon Musk

elon musk x, media matters, Policy / Mike M. / June 25, 2025

Media Matters for America sued the Federal Trade Commission yesterday, alleging that the FTC’s ongoing investigation into the group “has violated Media Matters’ First Amendment rights by retaliating against the organization for its reporting on Elon Musk and X.”

“The investigation is the latest effort by Elon Musk and his allies in the Trump administration to retaliate against Media Matters for its reporting on X, the social media site Musk controls, and it’s another example of the Trump administration weaponizing government authorities to target political opponents,” Media Matters said in a press release. The group said it has suffered financially because of “the cascade of litigation launched by Musk and his allies.”

The FTC’s investigative demand “makes no secret of its connection to Musk’s vindictive lawsuits,” and “probes Media Matters’ finances, editorial process, newsgathering activities, and affiliations with likeminded entities that monitor extremist content and other third parties,” Media Matters said in the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the District of Columbia.

Media Matters is a nonprofit journalism organization that has been targeted by Musk and Republicans for articles such as one showing that X placed advertisements next to pro-Nazi posts. Media Matters has faced probes from the Texas and Missouri attorneys general and a lawsuit filed by X. In the case involving Texas, a federal appeals court found in May that “Media Matters is the target of a government campaign of retaliation.”

Lawsuit: FTC “snoops into newsgathering activities”

The FTC sent a civil investigative demand (CID) on May 20, “apparently seeking to revive the state government investigations that had been blocked by this Court,” Media Matters said in its lawsuit yesterday. “The CID’s first substantive demand makes clear its connection to Musk’s lawsuits, seeking ‘all documents that Media Matters either produced or received in discovery in any litigation between Media Matters and X Corp. related to advertiser boycotts since 2023.'”

Media Matters sues FTC, says agency is retaliating on behalf of Elon Musk Read More »

Tuesday Telescope: A new champion enters the ring

Space, tuesday telescope, Vera Rubin / Mike M. / June 24, 2025

Welcome to the Tuesday Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

After a decade of construction, a large new reflecting telescope publicly released its first images on Monday, and they are nothing short of spectacular.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s primary mirror is 8.4 meters in diameter, which makes it one of the largest optical telescopes in the world. However, the real secret sauce of the telescope is its camera—the automobile-sized Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera—which has a resolution of 3,200 megapixels. Which is rather a lot.

The observatory is on a remote 2,682-meter-high (8,799 ft) mountain in northern Chile, a region of the planet with some of the best atmospheric “seeing” conditions.

The main goal of the telescope is to scan the entire Southern Hemisphere sky by taking 1,000 high-definition photographs every three nights for the next 10 years. The idea is that, assembled end to end, the observatory will provide a high-definition, four-dimensional film of the Universe changing over a decade. It will seek to encompass everything from nearby asteroids and comets to distant supernovae.

Who was Vera Rubin? She was an American astronomer who was the first person to establish the presence of dark matter in galaxies. The observatory named in her honor was funded by the US Department of Energy and the US National Science Foundation. International partners, including the French National Centre for Scientific Research, will help to store the 20 terabytes of data collected every night.

The only bummer about Monday’s announcement is the fact that it was funded by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. The Trump administration has sought to halve the science budgets of both agencies in the coming years. And the prospect of losing that funding, juxtaposed against the phenomenal start of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, reminds us of what we stand to lose if we slash basic science funding in this country.

Source: Vera C. Rubin Observatory

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Tuesday Telescope: A new champion enters the ring Read More »

How a data center company uses stranded renewable energy

data centers, green data centers, Science, syndication / Mike M. / June 21, 2025

“Decisions around where data centers get built have shifted dramatically over the last six months, with access to power now playing the most significant role in location scouting,” Joshi said. “The grid can’t keep pace with AI demands, so the industry is taking control with onsite power generation.”

Soluna, like other data center developers looking to rely on renewable energy, buys the excess power from wind, hydro, and solar plants that they can’t sell to the grid. By the end of the year, Soluna will have three facilities totaling 123 megawatts of capacity in Kentucky and Texas and seven projects in the works with upwards of 800 total megawatts.

Belizaire and I talked about how in Texas, where I report from, there’s plenty of curtailed energy from wind and solar farms because of the region’s transmission capacity. In West Texas, other data center developers are also taking advantage of the unused wind energy, far from major load centers like Dallas and Houston, by co-locating their giant warehouses full of advanced computers and high-powered cooling systems with the excess energy.

One data center developer using curtailed renewable power in Texas is IREN. The firm owns and operates facilities optimized for Bitcoin mining and AI. It developed a 7.5-gigawatt facility in Childress and broke ground on a 1.4-gigawatt data center in Sweetwater.

IREN purchases power through the state grid’s wholesale market during periods of oversupply, said Kent Draper, the company’s chief commercial officer, and reduces its consumption when prices are high. It’s able to do that by turning off its computers and minimizing power demand from its data centers.

But curtailment is an issue all over the world, Belizaire said, from Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota, California, and Arizona in the US, to Northern Ireland, Germany, Portugal, and Australia.

“Anywhere where you have large utility-scale renewable development that’s been built out, you’re going to find it,” Belizaire said.

In a March analysis, the US Energy Information Administration reported that solar and wind power curtailments are increasing in California. In 2024, the grid operator for most of California curtailed 3.4 million megawatt hours of utility-scale wind and solar output, a 29 percent increase from the amount of electricity curtailed in 2023.

How a data center company uses stranded renewable energy Read More »

MIT student prints AI polymer masks to restore paintings in hours

AI, AI image generators, art restoration, computer vision, conservation technology, cultural preservation, digital art tools, image synthesis, machine learning, MIT, museums, polymer technology, Science / Mike M. / June 21, 2025

MIT graduate student Alex Kachkine once spent nine months meticulously restoring a damaged baroque Italian painting, which left him plenty of time to wonder if technology could speed things up. Last week, MIT News announced his solution: a technique that uses AI-generated polymer films to physically restore damaged paintings in hours rather than months. The research appears in Nature.

Kachkine’s method works by printing a transparent “mask” containing thousands of precisely color-matched regions that conservators can apply directly to an original artwork. Unlike traditional restoration, which permanently alters the painting, these masks can reportedly be removed whenever needed. So it’s a reversible process that does not permanently change a painting.

“Because there’s a digital record of what mask was used, in 100 years, the next time someone is working with this, they’ll have an extremely clear understanding of what was done to the painting,” Kachkine told MIT News. “And that’s never really been possible in conservation before.”

Nature reports that up to 70 percent of institutional art collections remain hidden from public view due to damage—a large amount of cultural heritage sitting unseen in storage. Traditional restoration methods, where conservators painstakingly fill damaged areas one at a time while mixing exact color matches for each region, can take weeks to decades for a single painting. It’s skilled work that requires both artistic talent and deep technical knowledge, but there simply aren’t enough conservators to tackle the backlog.

The mechanical engineering student conceived the idea during a 2021 cross-country drive to MIT, when gallery visits revealed how much art remains hidden due to damage and restoration backlogs. As someone who restores paintings as a hobby, he understood both the problem and the potential for a technological solution.

To demonstrate his method, Kachkine chose a challenging test case: a 15th-century oil painting requiring repairs in 5,612 separate regions. An AI model identified damage patterns and generated 57,314 different colors to match the original work. The entire restoration process reportedly took 3.5 hours—about 66 times faster than traditional hand-painting methods.

A handout photo of Alex Kachkine, who developed the AI printed film technique. — Alex Kachkine, who developed the AI-printed film technique. Credit: MIT

Notably, Kachkine avoided using generative AI models like Stable Diffusion or the “full-area application” of generative adversarial networks (GANs) for the digital restoration step. According to the Nature paper, these models cause “spatial distortion” that would prevent proper alignment between the restored image and the damaged original.

MIT student prints AI polymer masks to restore paintings in hours Read More »

Man’s health crashes after getting donated kidney—it was riddled with worms

health, infection, Massachusetts General Hospital, NEJM, parasitic worms, strongyloides, Strongyloides stercoralis / Mike M. / June 21, 2025

About two months after receiving a donated kidney, a 61-year-old man ended up back in the hospital. He was tired, nauseous, and vomiting. He was also excessively thirsty and producing too much urine. Over the next 10 days, things only got worse. The oxygen levels in his blood began to fall. His lungs filled with fluid. He kept vomiting. He couldn’t eat. Doctors inserted a feeding tube. His oxygen levels and blood pressure kept falling. He was admitted to the intensive care unit and put on mechanical ventilation. Still, things kept getting worse.

At that point, he was transferred to the ICU of Massachusetts General Hospital, where he had received the transplant. He was in acute respiratory failure and shock.

In a case report in this week’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors at Mass General explained how they determined what was wrong with the man. Their first steps were collecting more information about the man’s symptoms from his wife, reviewing his family medical history, and contacting the regional organ-procurement organization that provided the kidney.

Process of elimination

The man’s condition and laboratory tests suggested he had some sort of infection. But as a transplant recipient who was on a variety of immunosuppressive drugs, the list of infectious possibilities was “extensive.”

Dr. Camille Kotton, Clinical Director of the hospital’s Transplant and Immunocompromised Host Infectious Diseases division, laid out her thinking. She started with a process of elimination. As an immunosuppressed transplant patient, he was also on several medications to proactively prevent infections. These would rule out herpesviruses and cytomegalovirus. He was also on a combination of antibiotics that would rule out many bacterial infections, as well as the fungal infection Pneumocystis jirovecii that strikes the immunocompromised and the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii.

One feature stood out: The man had developed elevated levels of eosinophils, white blood cells that can increase for various reasons—including parasitic infections. The man also had a reddish-purple rash over his abdomen. Coupled with the severity of his illness, Kotton suspected a widespread parasitic infection.

The man’s history was notable for contact with domestic cats and dogs—including a cat scratch in the time between having the transplant and falling critically ill. But common bacterial infections linked to cat scratches could be ruled out. And other parasitic infections that might come from domestic animals in the US, such as toxocariasis, don’t typically lead to such critical illnesses.

Man’s health crashes after getting donated kidney—it was riddled with worms Read More »

Spanish blackout report: Power plants meant to stabilize voltage didn’t

electricity, Energy, grid stability, Portugal, Science, spain / Mike M. / June 19, 2025

The blackout that took down the Iberian grid serving Spain and Portugal in April was the result of a number of smaller interacting problems, according to an investigation by the Spanish government. The report concludes that several steps meant to address a small instability made matters worse, eventually leading to a self-reinforcing cascade where high voltages caused power plants to drop off the grid, thereby increasing the voltage further. Critically, the report suggests that the Spanish grid operator had an unusually low number of plants on call to stabilize matters, and some of the ones it did have responded poorly.

The full report will be available later today; however, the government released a summary ahead of its release. The document includes a timeline of the events that triggered the blackout, as well as an analysis of why grid management failed to keep it in check. It also notes that a parallel investigation checked for indications of a cyberattack and found none.

Oscillations and a cascade

The document notes that for several days prior to the blackout, the Iberian grid had been experiencing voltage fluctuations—products of a mismatch between supply and demand—that had been managed without incident. These continued through the morning of April 28 until shortly after noon, when an unusual frequency oscillation occurred. This oscillation has been traced back to a single facility on the grid, but the report doesn’t identify it or even indicate its type, simply referring to it as an “instalación.”

The grid operators responded in a way that suppressed the oscillations but increased the voltages on the grid. About 15 minutes later, a weakened version of this oscillation occurred again, followed shortly thereafter by oscillations at a different frequency, this one with properties that are commonly seen on European grids. That prompted the grid operators to take corrective steps again, which increased the voltages on the grid.

The Iberian grid is capable of handling this sort of thing. But the grid operator only scheduled 10 power plants to handle voltage regulation on the 28th, which the report notes is the lowest total it had committed to in all of 2025 up to that point. The report found that a number of those plants failed to respond properly to the grid operators, and a few even responded in a way that contributed to the surging voltages.

Spanish blackout report: Power plants meant to stabilize voltage didn’t Read More »

Author name: Mike M.