Amazon

Amazon Prime Video subscribers sit through up to 6 minutes of ads per hour

ads, Amazon, prime video, streaming, Tech / Kelly Newman / June 12, 2025

Amazon forced all Prime Video subscribers onto a new ad-based subscription tier in January 2024 unless users paid more for their subscription type. Now, the tech giant is reportedly showing twice as many ads to subscribers as it did when it started selling ad-based streaming subscriptions.

Currently, anyone who signs up for Amazon Prime (which is $15 per month or $139 per year) gets Prime Video with ads. If they don’t want to see commercials, they have to pay an extra $3 per month. One can also subscribe to Prime Video alone for $9 per month with ads or $12 per month without ads.

When Amazon originally announced the ad tier, it said it would deliver “meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers.” Based on “six ad buyers and documents” ad trade publication AdWeek reported viewing, Amazon has determined the average is four to six minutes of advertisements per hour.

“Prime Video ad load has gradually increased to four to six minutes per hour,” an Amazon representative said via email to an ad buyer this month, AdWeek reported.

That would mean that Prime Video subscribers are spending significantly more time sitting through ads than they did at the launch of Prime Video with ads. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) at the time, which cited an Amazon presentation it said it reviewed, “the average ad load at launch was two to three-and-a-half minutes.” However, when reached for comment, an Amazon Ads representative told Ars Technica that the WSJ didn’t confirm that figure directly with Amazon.

Amazon’s Ads spokesperson, however, declined to specify to Ars how many ads Amazon typically shows to Prime Videos subscribers today or in the past.

Instead, they shared a statement saying:

We remain focused on prioritizing ad innovation over volume. While demand continues to grow, our commitment is to improving ad experiences rather than simply increasing the number of ads shown. Since the beginning of this year alone, we’ve announced multiple capabilities, including Brand+, Complete TV, and new ad formats—all designed to deliver industry-leading relevancy and enhanced customer experiences. We will continue to invest in this important work, creating meaningful innovations that benefit both customers and advertisers alike.

Kendra Tang, programmatic supervisor at ad firm Rain the Growth Agency, told AdWeek that Amazon “told us the ad load would be increasing” and that she’s seen more ad opportunities made available in Amazon’s ad system.

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Reddit sues Anthropic over AI scraping that retained users’ deleted posts

AI, ai scraping, alexa, Amazon, Anthropic, Artificial Intelligence, chatbots, Claude, large language models, Policy, reddit / Shannon Garcia / June 5, 2025

Of particular note, Reddit pointed out that Anthropic’s Claude models will help power Amazon’s revamped Alexa, following about $8 billion in Amazon investments in the AI company since 2023.

“By commercially licensing Claude for use in several of Amazon’s commercial offerings, Anthropic reaps significant profit from a technology borne of Reddit content,” Reddit alleged, and “at the expense of Reddit.” Anthropic’s unauthorized scraping also burdens Reddit’s servers, threatening to degrade the user experience and costing Reddit additional damages, Reddit alleged.

To rectify alleged harms, Reddit is hoping a jury will award not just damages covering Reddit’s alleged losses but also punitive damages due to Anthropic’s alleged conduct that is “willful, malicious, and undertaken with conscious disregard for Reddit’s contractual obligations to its users and the privacy rights of those users.”

Without an injunction, Reddit users allegedly have “no way of knowing” if Anthropic scraped their data, Reddit alleged. They also are “left to wonder whether any content they deleted after Claude began training on Reddit data nevertheless remains available to Anthropic and the likely tens of millions (and possibly growing) of Claude users,” Reddit said.

In a statement provided to Ars, Anthropic’s spokesperson confirmed that the AI company plans to fight Reddit’s claims.

“We disagree with Reddit’s claims and will defend ourselves vigorously,” Anthropic’s spokesperson said.

Amazon declined to comment. Reddit did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment. But Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, told The New York Times that Reddit “will not tolerate profit-seeking entities like Anthropic commercially exploiting Reddit content for billions of dollars without any return for redditors or respect for their privacy.”

“AI companies should not be allowed to scrape information and content from people without clear limitations on how they can use that data,” Lee said. “Licensing agreements enable us to enforce meaningful protections for our users, including the right to delete your content, user privacy protections, and preventing users from being spammed using this content.”

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Amazon Fire Sticks enable “billions of dollars” worth of streaming piracy

Amazon, Europe, Google, microsoft, piracy, sports, streaming, Tech / Shannon Garcia / May 31, 2025

Amazon Fire Sticks are enabling “billions of dollars” worth of streaming piracy, according to a report today from Enders Analysis, a media, entertainment, and telecommunications research firm. Technologies from other media conglomerates, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, are also enabling what the report’s authors deem an “industrial scale of theft.”

The report, “Video piracy: Big tech is clearly unwilling to address the problem,” focuses on the European market but highlights the global growth of piracy of streaming services as they increasingly acquire rights to live programs, like sporting events.

Per the BBC, the report points to the availability of multiple, simultaneous illegal streams for big events that draw tens of thousands of pirate viewers.

Enders’ report places some blame on Facebook for showing advertisements for access to illegal streams, as well as Google and Microsoft for the alleged “continued depreciation” of their digital rights management (DRM) systems, Widevine and PlayReady, respectively. Ars Technica reached out to Facebook, Google, and Microsoft for comment but didn’t receive a response before publication.

The report echoes complaints shared throughout the industry, including by the world’s largest European soccer streamer, DAZN. Streaming piracy is “almost a crisis for the sports rights industry,” DAZN’s head of global rights, Tom Burrows, said at The Financial Times’ Business of Football Summit in February. At the same event, Nick Herm, COO of Comcast-owned European telecommunication firm Sky Group, estimated that piracy was costing his company “hundreds of millions of dollars” in revenue. At the time, Enders co-founder Claire Enders said that the pirating of sporting events accounts for “about 50 percent of most markets.”

Jailbroken Fire Sticks

Friday’s Enders report named Fire Sticks as a significant contributor to streaming piracy, calling the hardware a “piracy enabler.”

Enders’ report pointed to security risks that pirate viewers face, including providing credit card information and email addresses to unknown entities, which can make people vulnerable to phishing and malware. However, reports of phishing and malware stemming from streaming piracy, which occurs through various methods besides a Fire TV Stick, seem to be rather limited.

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Amazon and Stellantis abandon project to create a digital “SmartCockpit”

Amazon, Cars, Stellantis / Kelly Newman / May 29, 2025

Automaker Stellantis and retail and web services behemoth Amazon have decided to put an end to a collaboration on new in-car software. The partnership dates back to 2022, part of a wide-ranging agreement that also saw Stellantis pick Amazon Web Services as its cloud platform for new vehicles and Amazon sign on as the first customer for Ram’s fully electric ProMaster EV van.

A key aspect of the Amazon-Stellantis partnership was to be a software platform for new Stellantis vehicles called STLA SmartCockpit. Meant to debut last year, SmartCockpit was supposed to “seamlessly integrate with customers’ digital lives to create personalized, intuitive in-vehicle experiences,” using Alexa and other AI agents to provide better in-car entertainment but also navigation, vehicle maintenance, and in-car payments as well.

But 2024 came and went without the launch of SmartCockpit, and now the joint work has wound down, according to Reuters, although not for any particular reason the news organization could discern. Rather, the companies said in a statement that they “will allow each team to focus on solutions that provide value to our shared customers and better align with our evolving strategies.”

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It was probably always going to end this way for Amazon’s Wheel of Time show

Amazon, Amazon Prime, culture, the wheel of time / DJ Henderson / May 28, 2025

Opinion: Wider TV trends helped kill a show that was starting to live up to its promise.

Moiraine contemplates The Blight. Credit: Amazon Studios

Late on Friday, Amazon announced that it was canceling its TV adaptation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, after several uncomfortable weeks of silence that followed the show’s third season finale.

Fans of the series can take some cold comfort in the fact that it apparently wasn’t an easy decision to make. But as we speculated in our write-up of what ended up being the show’s series finale, an expensive show with a huge cast, tons of complicated costuming and effects, and extensive location shooting only makes mathematical sense if it’s a megahit, and The Wheel of Time was never a megahit.

Adapting the unadaptable

I was sad about the cancellation announcement because I believe this season was the one where the show found its footing, both as an adaptation of a complex book series and as a fun TV show in its own right. But I wasn’t surprised by it. The only thing I found surprising was that it took this long to happen.

Two things conspired to make it impossible for this Wheel of Time show to ever reach the Last Battle. One has to do with the source material itself; the other has to do with the way the TV business has changed since Game of Thrones premiered in 2011.

The Wheel of Time actively resists adaptation. It’s a sprawling 14-book series spanning dozens of named point-of-view characters and impossibly dense politics. And it even spans multiple eras stylistically—the early books were more Tolkien-esque in their focus on small bands of adventurers and a limited number of perspectives, where later books could go for multiple chapters without putting you in the head of one of the series’ half-dozen-ish main protagonists. And even among the series’ die-hard fans, most will admit that there are storylines, characters, or entire books that feel inessential or annoying or repetitive or sloggy or wheel-spinning.

Any adaptation would need to find a way to stay true to the story that the books were telling, and to marry the tone and pacing of the early, middle, and late-series books, while wrestling with the realities of a different medium (in particular, you cannot realistically pay for infinite episodes or pay infinite cast members, especially for a live-action show).

Image of the battle of the Two Rivers — By season 3, the show had become adept at translating big book moments for the screen.

That high degree of difficulty was surely one reason why it took someone so long to decide to tackle The Wheel of Time, even in the post-Peter Jackson, post-Harry Potter, post-Marvel Cinematic Universe, post-Game of Thrones creative landscape where nerd-coded sci-fi and fantasy were suddenly cool, where multi-part book adaptations were drawing dollars and eyeballs, and where convoluted interconnected stories could be billion-dollar businesses. The only stab anyone took at an adaptation before Amazon happened a full decade ago, when a fly-by-night production company aired a hastily shot adaptation of the first book’s prologue in an apparent attempt to keep the TV rights from expiring.

It’s also what makes the cancellation news so much more frustrating—over three seasons, showrunner Rafe Judkins and the cast and crew of the show became adept at adapting the unadaptable. Yes, the story and the characters had changed in a lot of major ways. Yes, the short eight-episode seasons made for frenetic pacing and overstuffed episodes. But if you grit your teeth a bit and push through the show’s mess of a first season, you hit a series that seemed to know what must-hit scenes needed to be shown; which parts of the books were skippable or could be combined with other moments; which parts of later books to pull forward to streamline the story without making those moments feel rushed or unearned. It was imperfect, but it was a true adaptation—a reworking of a story for a much different medium that seemed to know how to keep the essence of the story intact.

Ambition meets reality

Image of Rand trying to do something with the Power that cannot be done — Like Rand al’Thor struggling with the One Power, *The Wheel of Time* struggled against the realities of the current TV landscape. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

The thing that doomed this particular Wheel of Time production from the start was the sky-high expectations that Amazon had for it. Both Wheel of Time and the heartbreakingly bland Rings of Power were born of Jeff Bezos’ desire to find his own Game of Thrones, which became an unexpected smash-hit success that dominated the cultural conversation through the 2010s. Most TV shows either launch strongly before slowly fading, or they build an audience over a few seasons and then fade after reaching their peak. Game of Thrones defied these trends, and each new season drew a larger and larger viewership even as the show’s quality (arguably) dipped over time.

Asking Wheel of Time to replicate that success would be a tall order for any television show in any era—pop culture is littered with shows that have tried and failed to clone another network’s successful formula. But it’s an especially difficult hurdle to clear in the fractured 2020s TV landscape.

Streaming TV’s blank check era—which ran roughly from Netflix’s introduction of its first original shows in 2013 to 2022, when Netflix reported its first big dip in subscribers just as a long era of low-interest lending was coming to an end—used to give shows a ton of runway and plenty of seasons to tell their stories. Shows like Orange is the New Black or BoJack Horseman that found some modicum of critical acclaim and ratings success tended to get renewed multiple times, and six or seven-season runs were common.

A commitment to reviving old critically beloved bubble shows like Arrested Development, Community, Futurama, and Gilmore Girls also sent a message: Freed from the restrictive economics of the Old TV Model and fueled by the promise of infinite growth, we can make whatever TV we want!

Those days are mostly gone now (except perhaps at Apple TV+, which continues to leverage its parent company’s deep pockets to throw gobs of money at any actor or IP with a moderately recognizable name). In the two years since TV streamers began cutting back in earnest, industry analysts have observed a consistent trend toward shorter seasons of fewer episodes and fewer renewals for existing shows.

Those trends hit at the exact wrong moment for The Wheel of Time, which was constantly straining against the bonds of its eight-episode seasons. It’s impossible to say empirically whether longer seasons would have made for a better show, and whether that “better show” could have achieved the kind of word-of-mouth success it would have needed to meet Amazon’s expectations. But speaking anecdotally as someone who was just beginning to recommend the show to people who weren’t hardcore book readers, the density and pacing were two major barriers to entry. And even the most truncated possible version of the story would have needed at least six or seven seasons to wrap up in anything resembling a satisfactory way, based on the pace that was set in the first three seasons.

The end of Time

The arms of the Car'a'carn — *Wheel of Time* fans didn’t get to see everything translated from book to screen. But we did get to see a lot of things. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Tellingly, the Wheel of Time‘s creative team hasn’t released faux-optimistic boilerplate statements about trying to shop the show to other networks, the kind of statements you sometimes see after a show is canceled before its creators are done with it. The same economics that made Amazon drop the show also make it nearly impossible to sell to anyone else.

And so The Wheel of Time joins TV’s long list of unfinished stories. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But this is an ending.

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

It was probably always going to end this way for Amazon’s Wheel of Time show Read More »

We finally know a little more about Amazon’s super-secret satellites

Amazon, atlas v, broadband, Internet, kuiper, launch, Science, Space, united launch alliance / Kelly Newman / May 3, 2025

“Elon thinks we can do the job with cheaper and simpler satellites, sooner,” a source told Reuters at the time of Badyal’s dismissal. Earlier in 2018, SpaceX launched a pair of prototype cube-shaped Internet satellites for demonstrations in orbit. Then, less than a year after firing Badyal, Musk’s company launched the first full stack of Starlink satellites, debuting the now-standard flat-panel design.

In a post Friday on LinkedIn, Badyal wrote the Kuiper satellites have had “an entirely nominal start” to their mission. “We’re just over 72 hours into our first full-scale Kuiper mission, and the adrenaline is still high.”

The Starlink and Kuiper constellations use laser inter-satellite links to relay Internet signals from node-to-node across their networks. Starlink broadcasts consumer broadband in Ku-band frequencies, while Kuiper will use Ka-band.

Ultimately, SpaceX’s simplified Starlink deployment architecture has fewer parts and eliminates the need for a carrier structure. This allows SpaceX to devote a higher share of the rocket’s mass and volume capacity to the Starlink satellites themselves, replacing dead weight with revenue-earning capability. The dispenser architecture used by Amazon is a more conventional design, and gives satellite engineers more flexibility in designing their spacecraft. It also allows satellites to spread out faster in orbit.

Others involved in the broadband megaconstellation rush have copied SpaceX’s architecture.

China’s Qianfan, or Thousand Sails, satellites have a “standardized and modular” flat-panel design that “meets the needs of stacking multiple satellites with one rocket,” according to the company managing the constellation. While Chinese officials haven’t released any photos of the satellites, which could eventually number more than 14,000, this sounds a lot like the design of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.

Another piece of information released by United Launch Alliance helps us arrive at an estimate of the mass of each Kuiper satellite. The collection of 27 satellites that launched earlier this week added up to be the heaviest payload ever flown on ULA’s Atlas V rocket. ULA said the total payload the Atlas V delivered to orbit was about 34,000 pounds, equivalent to roughly 15.4 metric tons.

It wasn’t clear whether this number accounted for the satellite dispenser, which likely weighed somewhere in the range of 1,000 to 2,000 pounds at launch. This would put the mass of each Kuiper satellite somewhere between 1,185 and 1,259 pounds (537 and 571 kilograms).

This is not far off the estimated mass of SpaceX’s most recent iteration of Starlink satellites, a version known as V2 Mini Optimized. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has launched up to 28 of these flat-packed satellites on a single launch.

We finally know a little more about Amazon’s super-secret satellites Read More »

A rocket launch Monday night may finally jump-start Amazon’s answer to Starlink

Amazon, atlas v, broadband, cape canaveral, Commercial space, project kuiper, Science, Space, united launch alliance / Mike M. / April 29, 2025

“This launch marks the first step toward the future of our partnership and increased launch cadence,” Bruno said. “We have been steadily modifying our launch facilities in Cape Canaveral to support the capacity for future Project Kuiper missions in a manner that will ultimately benefit both our commercial and government customers as we endeavor to save lives, explore the universe, and connect the world.”

The Atlas V rocket was powered by a Russian-made RD-180 main engine and five strap-on solid rocket boosters. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Amazon ground controllers in Redmond, Washington, are overseeing the operation of the first 27 Kuiper satellites. Engineers there will test each satellite’s ability to independently maneuver and communicate with mission control. So far, this appears to be going well.

The next step will involve activating the satellites’ electric propulsion systems to gradually climb to their assigned orbit of 392 miles (630 kilometers).

“While the satellites complete the orbit-raising process, we will look ahead to our ultimate mission objective: providing end-to-end network connectivity,” Amazon said in a press release. “This involves sending data from the Internet, through our ground infrastructure, up to the satellites, and down to customer terminal antennas, and then repeating the journey in the other direction.”

A moveable deadline

While most of the rockets Amazon will use for the Kuiper network have only recently entered service, that’s not true of the Atlas V. Delays in spacecraft manufacturing at Amazon’s factory near Seattle kept the first Kuiper satellites on the ground until now.

An Amazon spokesperson told Ars that the company is already shipping Kuiper satellites for the next launch on an Atlas V rocket. Sources suggest that mission could lift off in June.

Amazon released this image of Kuiper user terminals in 2023. Credit: Amazon

Amazon and its launch suppliers need to get moving. Kuiper officials face a July 2026 deadline from the Federal Communications Commission to deploy half of the fleet’s 3,236 satellites to maintain network authorization. This is not going to happen. It would require an average of nearly one launch per week, starting now.

The time limit is movable, and the FCC has extended network authorization deadlines before. Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the FCC, has argued for a more “market-friendly regulatory environment” in a chapter he authored for the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, widely seen as a blueprint for the Trump administration’s strategies.

But Carr is a close ally of Elon Musk, owner of Kuiper’s primary competitor, Starlink.

Amazon is not selling subscriptions for Kuiper service yet, and the company has said its initial focus will be on testing Kuiper connectivity with “enterprise customers” before moving on to consumer broadband. Apart from challenging Starlink, Kuiper will also compete in some market segments with Eutelsat OneWeb, the London-based operator of the only other active Internet megaconstellation.

OneWeb’s more than 600 satellites provide service to businesses, governments, schools, and hospitals rather than direct service to individual consumers.

A rocket launch Monday night may finally jump-start Amazon’s answer to Starlink Read More »

Trump’s tariffs trigger price hikes at large online retailers

Amazon, Donald Trump, eCommerce, Online Shopping, Policy, shein, tariffs, temu, us-china trade war / Kelly Newman / April 18, 2025

Popular online shopping meccas Temu and Shein have finally broken their silence, warning of potential price hikes starting next week due to Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Temu is a China-based e-commerce platform that has grown as popular as Amazon for global shoppers making cross-border purchases, according to 2024 Statista data. Its tagline, “Shop like a billionaire,” is inextricably linked to the affordability of items on its platform. And although Shein—which vows to make global fashion “accessible to all” by selling inexpensive stylish clothing—moved its headquarters from China to Singapore in 2022, most of its products are still controversially manufactured in China, the BBC reported.

For weeks, the US-China trade war has seen both sides spiking tariffs. In the US, the White House last night crunched the numbers and confirmed that China now faces tariffs of up to 245 percent, The Wall Street Journal reported. That figure includes new tariffs Trump has imposed, taxing all Chinese goods by 145 percent, as well as prior 100 percent tariffs lobbed by the Biden administration that are still in effect on EVs and Chinese syringes.

Last week, China announced that it would stop retaliations, CNBC reported. But that came after China rolled out 125 percent tariffs on US goods. While China has since accused Trump of weaponizing tariffs to “an irrational level,” other retaliations have included increasingly cutting off US access to critical minerals used in tech manufacturing and launching antitrust probes into US companies.

For global retailers, the tit-for-tat tariffs have immediately scrambled business plans. Particularly for Temu and Shein, Trump’s decision to end the “de minimis” exemption on May 2—which allowed shipments valued under $800 to be imported duty-free—will soon hit hard, exposing them to 90 percent tariffs that inevitably led to next week’s price shifts. According to The Guardian, starting on June 1, retailers will have to pay $150 tariffs on each individual package.

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There’s a secret reason the Space Force is delaying the next Atlas V launch

Amazon, kuiper, launch, Space, space force, united launch alliance / Mike M. / April 18, 2025

The Space Force is looking for responsive launch. This week, they’re the unresponsive ones.

File photo of a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch in 2022. Credit: SpaceX

Pushed by trackmobile railcar movers, the Atlas V rocket rolled to the launch pad last week with a full load of 27 satellites for Amazon’s Kuiper Internet megaconstellation. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Last week, the first operational satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband network were minutes from launch at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

These spacecraft, buttoned up on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, are the first of more than 3,200 mass-produced satellites Amazon plans to launch over the rest of the decade to deploy the first direct US competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink Internet network.

However, as is often the case on Florida’s Space Coast, bad weather prevented the satellites from launching April 9. No big deal, right? Anyone who pays close attention to the launch industry knows delays are part of the business. A broken component on the rocket, a summertime thunderstorm, or high winds can thwart a launch attempt. Launch companies know this, and the answer is usually to try again the next day.

But something unusual happened when ULA scrubbed the countdown last Wednesday. ULA’s launch director, Eric Richards, instructed his team to “proceed with preparations for an extended turnaround.” This meant ULA would have to wait more than 24 hours for the next Atlas V launch attempt.

But why?

At first, there seemed to be a good explanation for the extended turnaround. SpaceX was preparing to launch a set of Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket around the same time as Atlas V’s launch window the next day. The Space Force’s Eastern Range manages scheduling for all launches at Cape Canaveral and typically operates on a first-come, first-served basis.

The Space Force accommodated 93 launches on the Eastern Range last year—sometimes on the same day—an annual record that military officials are quite proud of achieving. This is nearly six times the number of launches from Cape Canaveral in 2014, a growth rate primarily driven by SpaceX. In previous interviews, Space Force officials have emphasized their eagerness to support more commercial launches. “How do we get to yes?” is often what range officials ask themselves when a launch provider submits a scheduling request.

It wouldn’t have been surprising for SpaceX to get priority on the range schedule since it had already reserved the launch window with the Space Force for April 10. SpaceX subsequently delayed this particular Starlink launch for two days until it finally launched on Saturday evening, April 12. Another SpaceX Starlink mission launched Monday morning.

There are several puzzling things about what happened last week. When SpaceX missed its reservation on the range twice in two days, April 10 and 11, why didn’t ULA move back to the front of the line?

ULA, which is usually fairly transparent about its reasons for launch scrubs, didn’t disclose any technical problems with the rocket that would have prevented another launch attempt. ULA offers access to listen to the launch team’s audio channel during the countdown, and engineers were not discussing any significant technical issues.

The company’s official statement after the scrub said: “A new launch date will be announced when approved on the range.”

Also, why can’t ULA make another run at launching the Kuiper mission this week? The answer to that question is also a mystery, but we have some educated speculation.

Changes in attitudes

A few days ago, SpaceX postponed one of its own Starlink missions from Cape Canaveral without explanation, leaving the Florida spaceport with a rare week without any launches. SpaceX plans to resume launches from Florida early next week with the liftoff of a resupply mission to the International Space Station. The delayed Starlink mission will fly a few days later.

Meanwhile, the next launch attempt for ULA is unknown.

Tory Bruno, ULA’s president and CEO, wrote on X that questions about what is holding up the next Atlas V launch are best directed toward the Space Force. A spokesperson for ULA told Ars the company is still working with the range to determine the next launch date. “The rocket and payload are healthy,” she said. “We will announce the new launch date once confirmed.”

While the SpaceX launch delay this week might suggest a link to the same range kerfuffle facing United Launch Alliance, it’s important to point out a key difference between the companies’ rockets. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 uses an automated flight termination system to self-destruct the rocket if it flies off course, while ULA’s Atlas V uses an older human-in-the-loop range safety system, which requires additional staff and equipment. Therefore, the Space Force is more likely to be able to accommodate a SpaceX mission near another activity on the range.

One more twist in this story is that a few days before the launch attempt, ULA changed its launch window for the Kuiper mission on April 9 from midday to the evening hours due to a request from the Eastern Range. Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, the range commander, spoke with reporters in a roundtable meeting last week. After nearly 20 years of covering launches from Cape Canaveral, I found a seven-hour time change so close to launch to be unusual, so I asked Panzenhagen about the reason for it, mostly out of curiosity. She declined to offer any details.

File photo of a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch in 2022. Credit: SpaceX

“The Eastern Range is huge,” she said. “It’s 15 million square miles. So, as you can imagine, there are a lot of players that are using that range space, so there’s a lot of de-confliction … Public safety is our top priority, and we take that very seriously on both ranges. So, we are constantly de-conflicting, but I’m not going to get into details of what the actual conflict was.”

It turns out the range conflict now impacting the Eastern Range is having some longer-lasting impacts. While a one- or two-week launch delay doesn’t seem serious, it adds up to deferred or denied revenue for a commercial satellite operator. National security missions get priority on range schedules at Cape Canaveral and at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, but there are significantly more commercial missions than military launches from both spaceports.

Clearly, there’s something out of the ordinary going on in the Eastern Range, which extends over much of the Atlantic Ocean to the southeast, east, and northeast of Cape Canaveral. The range includes tracking equipment, security forces, and ground stations in Florida and downrange sites in Bermuda and Ascension Island.

One possibility is a test of one or more submarine-launched Trident ballistic missiles, which commonly occur in the waters off the east coast of Florida. But those launches are usually accompanied by airspace and maritime warning notices to ensure pilots and sailors steer clear of the test. Nothing of the sort has been publicly released in the last couple of weeks.

Maybe something is broken at the Florida launch base. When launches were less routine than today, the range at Cape Canaveral would close for a couple of weeks per year for upgrades and refurbishment of critical infrastructure. This is no longer the case. In 2023, Panzenhagen told Ars that the Space Force changed the policy.

“When the Eastern Range was supporting 15 to 20 launches a year, we had room to schedule dedicated periods for maintenance of critical infrastructure,” she said at the time. “During these periods, launches were paused while teams worked the upgrades. Now that the launch cadence has grown to nearly twice per week, we’ve adapted to the new way of business to best support our mission partners.”

Perhaps, then, it’s something more secret, like a larger-scale, multi-element military exercise or war game that either requires Eastern Range participation or is taking place in areas the Space Force needs to clear for safety reasons for a rocket launch to go forward. The military sometimes doesn’t publicize these activities until they’re over.

A Space Force spokesperson did not respond to Ars Technica’s questions on the matter.

While we’re still a ways off from rocket launches becoming as routine as an airplane flight, the military is shifting in the way it thinks about spaceports. Instead of offering one-off bespoke services tailored to the circumstances of each launch, the Space Force wants to operate the ranges more like an airport.

“We’ve changed the nomenclature from calling ourselves a range to calling ourselves a spaceport because we see ourselves more like an airport in the future,” one Space Force official told Ars for a previous story.

In the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal-year 2024, Congress gave the Space Force the authority to charge commercial launch providers indirect fees to help pay for common infrastructure at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg—things like roads, electrical and water utilities, and base security used by all rocket operators at each spaceport. The military previously could only charge rocket companies direct fees for the specific services it offered in support of a particular launch, while the government was on the hook for overhead costs.

Military officials characterize the change in law as a win-win for the government and commercial launch providers. Ideally, it will grow the pool of money available to modernize the military’s spaceports, making them more responsive to all users, whether it’s the Space Force, SpaceX, ULA, or a startup new to the launch industry.

Whatever is going on in Florida or the Atlantic Ocean this week, it’s something the Space Force doesn’t want to talk about in detail. Maybe there are good reasons for that.

Cape Canaveral is America’s busiest launch base. Extending the spaceport-airport analogy a little further, the closure of America’s busiest airport for a week or more would be a big deal. One of the holy grails the Space Force is pursuing is the capability to launch on demand.

This week, there’s demand for launch slots at Cape Canaveral, but the answer is no.

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

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Newer Kindles get a work-around for touchscreen page-turning in new software update

Amazon, kindle, kindle colorsoft, kindle paperwhite, Tech / 9u50fv / March 27, 2025

All Kindles that get the 5.18.1 update also gain access to new book summaries for “thousands of bestselling English language Kindle books,” aiming to make it easier to pick up a new book in an ongoing series.

When a recap is available, it will be accessible from your Kindle’s home page, or by opening the book and selecting “Recaps In This Series” from the menu. Opening a recap will show you a spoiler warning before you tap through. Based on the handful of recaps I could find and skim, there’s a pretty good chance these summaries are mostly AI-generated, but Amazon’s release notes and the Kindle interface don’t say one way or the other.

The 5.18.1 update also includes the typical non-specific “performance improvements, bug fixes, and other general enhancements” for all models. This is the first update to get the Colorsoft and the other Kindles running on the same software version—before now, the other Kindles were all on version 5.17, and the Colorsoft ran a version of 5.18 that wasn’t available for manual download from Amazon’s software update page.

Newer Kindles get a work-around for touchscreen page-turning in new software update Read More »

Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28

Amazon, amazon alexa, Tech / Beth Washington / March 15, 2025

If that’s not enough to deter you from sharing voice recordings with Amazon, note that the company allowed employees to listen to Alexa voice recordings. In 2019, Bloomberg reported that Amazon employees listened to as many as 1,000 audio samples during their nine-hour shifts. Amazon says it allows employees to listen to Alexa voice recordings to train its speech recognition and natural language understanding systems.

Other reasons why people may be hesitant to trust Amazon with personal voice samples include the previous usage of Alexa voice recordings in criminal trials and Amazon paying a settlement in 2023 in relation to allegations that it allowed “thousands of employees and contractors to watch video recordings of customers’ private spaces” taken from Ring cameras, per the Federal Trade Commission.

Save recordings or lose functionality

Likely looking to get ahead of these concerns, Amazon said in its email today that by default, it will delete recordings of users’ Alexa requests after processing. However, anyone with their Echo device set to “Don’t save recordings” will see their already-purchased devices’ Voice ID feature bricked. Voice ID enables Alexa to do things like share user-specified calendar events, reminders, music, and more. Previously, Amazon has said that “if you choose not to save any voice recordings, Voice ID may not work.” As of March 28, broken Voice ID is a guarantee for people who don’t let Amazon store their voice recordings.

Amazon’s email says:

Alexa voice requests are always encrypted in transit to Amazon’s secure cloud, which was designed with layers of security protections to keep customer information safe. Customers can continue to choose from a robust set of controls by visiting the Alexa Privacy dashboard online or navigating to More > Alexa Privacy in the Alexa app.

Amazon is forcing Echo users to make a couple of tough decisions: Grant Amazon access to recordings of everything you say to Alexa or stop using an Echo; let Amazon save voice recordings and have employees listen to them or lose a feature set to become more advanced and central to the next generation of Alexa.

However, Amazon is betting big that Alexa+ can dig the voice assistant out of a financial pit. Amazon has publicly committed to keeping the free version of Alexa around, but Alexa+ is viewed as Amazon’s last hope for keeping Alexa alive and making it profitable. Anything Amazon can do to get people to pay for Alexa takes precedence over other Alexa user demands, including, it seems, privacy.

Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28 Read More »

PSA: Amazon kills “download & transfer via USB” option for Kindles this week

Amazon, Amazon Kindle, DRM, ebooks, kindle, Tech / Shannon Garcia / February 25, 2025

Later this week, Amazon is closing a small loophole that allowed purchasers of Kindle books to download those files to a computer and transfer them via USB. Originally intended to extend e-book access to owners of very old Kindles without Wi-Fi connectivity, the feature has also made it easier for people to download and store copies of the e-books they’ve bought, reducing the risk that Amazon might make changes to their text or remove them from the Kindle store entirely.

The “Download & transfer via USB” option on Amazon’s site is going away this Wednesday, February 26. People who want to download their libraries to their PC easily should do so within the next two days. This change only affects the ability to download these files directly to a computer from Amazon’s website—if you’ve downloaded the books beforehand, you’ll still be able to load them on your Kindles via USB, and you’ll still be able to use third-party software as well as the Send to Kindle service to get EPUB files and other books loaded onto a Kindle.

Downloading files to your PC through Amazon’s site is still possible, but it’s going away later this week. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

For typical Kindle owners who buy their books via Amazon’s store and seamlessly download them to modern or modern-ish Kindle devices over Wi-Fi, you likely won’t notice any change. The effects will be noticed most by those who use third-party software like Calibre to manage a local e-book library and people who have hopped to other e-reader platforms who want to be able to download their Kindle purchases and strip them of their DRM so they can be read elsewhere.

The download-and-transfer option was useful for DRM haters partly because the files are delivered in the older AZW3 file format rather than the newer KFX format. AZW3 is the file format used by those older, pre-Wi-Fi Kindles, and its DRM is generally easier to remove.

Getting your files

If you’re trying to download your Kindle purchases to your PC and Mac before the deadline, you’ll need to have a somewhat older Kindle or Fire device attached to your account. If you only have one of the 2024 Kindles associated with your Amazon account (the newest Paperwhite, the second-generation Scribe, or the Colorsoft), you won’t be offered the download option. Amazon’s site will also only allow you to download a single book at a time, which could take quite a while, depending on the size of your library.

PSA: Amazon kills “download & transfer via USB” option for Kindles this week Read More »