Donald Trump – Page 5

Appeals court blocks FCC’s efforts to bring back net neutrality rules

brendan carr, broadband providers, Donald Trump, FCC, Joe Biden, Net Neutrality, open Internet, Policy / Mike M. / January 2, 2025

“The key here is not whether Broadband Internet Service Providers utilize telecommunications; it is instead whether they do so while offering to consumers the capability to do more,” Griffin wrote, concluding that “they do.”

“The FCC exceeded its statutory authority,” Griffin wrote, at one point accusing the FCC of arguing for a reading of the statute “that is too sweeping.”

The three-judge panel ordered a stay of the FCC’s order imposing net neutrality rules—known as the Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet Order.

In a statement, FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel suggested that Congress would likely be the only path to safeguard net neutrality moving forward. In the federal register, experts noted that net neutrality is critical to boosting new applications, services, or content, warning that without clear rules, the next Amazon or YouTube could be throttled before it can get off the ground.

“Consumers across the country have told us again and again that they want an Internet that is fast, open, and fair,” Rosenworcel said. “With this decision it is clear that Congress now needs to heed their call, take up the charge for net neutrality, and put open Internet principles in federal law.”

Rosenworcel will soon leave the FCC and will be replaced by Trump’s incoming FCC chair pick, Brendan Carr, who helped overturn net neutrality in 2017 and is expected to loosen broadband regulations once he’s confirmed.

Appeals court blocks FCC’s efforts to bring back net neutrality rules Read More »

Trump told SCOTUS he plans to make a deal to save TikTok

bytedance, china, Donald Trump, First Amendment, free speech, online censorship, Policy, social media censorship, Supreme Court, tiktok, TikTok ban / Kelly Newman / December 30, 2024

Several members of Congress— Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Representative Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)—filed a brief agreeing that “the TikTok ban does not survive First Amendment scrutiny.” They agreed with TikTok that the law is “illegitimate.”

Lawmakers’ “principle justification” for the ban—”preventing covert content manipulation by the Chinese government”—masked a “desire” to control TikTok content, they said. Further, it could be achieved by a less-restrictive alternative, they said, a stance which TikTok has long argued for.

Attorney General Merrick Garland defended the Act, though, urging SCOTUS to remain laser-focused on the question of whether a forced sale of TikTok that would seemingly allow the app to continue operating without impacting American free speech violates the First Amendment. If the court agrees that the law survives strict scrutiny, TikTok could still be facing an abrupt shutdown in January.

The Supreme Court has scheduled oral arguments to begin on January 10. TikTok and content creators who separately sued to block the law have asked for their arguments to be divided, so that the court can separately weigh “different perspectives” when deciding how to approach the First Amendment question.

In its own brief, TikTok has asked SCOTUS to strike the portions of the law singling out TikTok or “at the very least” explain to Congress that “it needed to do far better work either tailoring the Act’s restrictions or justifying why the only viable remedy was to prohibit Petitioners from operating TikTok.”

But that may not be necessary if Trump prevails. Trump told the court that TikTok was an important platform for his presidential campaign and that he should be the one to make the call on whether TikTok should remain in the US—not the Supreme Court.

“As the incoming Chief Executive, President Trump has a particularly powerful interest in and responsibility for those national-security and foreign-policy questions, and he is the right constitutional actor to resolve the dispute through political means,” Trump’s brief said.

Trump told SCOTUS he plans to make a deal to save TikTok Read More »

China’s plan to dominate legacy chips globally sparks US probe

anticompetitive behavior, china tariffs, Donald Trump, foundational semiconductors, Joe Biden, legacy chips, Policy, semiconductor industry, us-china trade war / Kelly Newman / December 23, 2024

Under Joe Biden’s direction, the US Trade Representative (USTR) launched a probe Monday into China’s plans to globally dominate markets for legacy chips—alleging that China’s unfair trade practices threaten US national security and could thwart US efforts to build up a domestic semiconductor supply chain.

Unlike the most advanced chips used to power artificial intelligence that are currently in short supply, these legacy chips rely on older manufacturing processes and are more ubiquitous in mass-market products. They’re used in tech for cars, military vehicles, medical devices, smartphones, home appliances, space projects, and much more.

China apparently “plans to build more than 60 percent of the world’s new legacy chip capacity over the next decade,” and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said evidence showed this was “discouraging investment elsewhere and constituted unfair competition,” Reuters reported.

Most people purchasing common goods don’t even realize they’re using Chinese chips, including government agencies, and the probe is meant to fix that by flagging everywhere Chinese chips are found in the US. Raimondo said she was “fairly alarmed” that research showed “two-thirds of US products using chips had Chinese legacy chips in them, and half of US companies did not know the origin of their chips including some in the defense industry.”

To deter harms from any of China’s alleged anticompetitive behavior, the USTR plans to spend a year investigating all of China’s acts, policies, and practices that could be helping China achieve global dominance in the foundational semiconductor market.

The agency will start by probing “China’s manufacturing of foundational semiconductors (also known as legacy or mature node semiconductors),” the press release said, “including to the extent that they are incorporated as components into downstream products for critical industries like defense, automotive, medical devices, aerospace, telecommunications, and power generation and the electrical grid.”

Additionally, the probe will assess China’s potential impact on “silicon carbide substrates (or other wafers used as inputs into semiconductor fabrication)” to ensure China isn’t burdening or restricting US commerce.

Some officials were frustrated that Biden didn’t launch the probe sooner, the Financial Times reported. It will ultimately be up to Donald Trump’s administration to complete the investigation, but Biden and Trump have long been aligned on US-China trade strategies, so Trump is not necessarily expected to meddle with the probe. Reuters noted that the probe could set Trump up to pursue his campaign promise of imposing a 60 percent tariff on all goods from China, but FT pointed out that Trump could also plan to use tariffs as a “bargaining chip” in his own trade negotiations.

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Trump nominates Jared Isaacman to become the next NASA administrator

artemis, Donald Trump, human spaceflight, jared isaacman, NASA, Science, Space, space policy, spacex / Beth Washington / December 4, 2024

President-elect Donald Trump announced Wednesday he has selected Jared Isaacman, a billionaire businessman and space enthusiast who twice flew to orbit with SpaceX, to become the next NASA administrator.

“I am delighted to nominate Jared Isaacman, an accomplished business leader, philanthropist, pilot, and astronaut, as Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA),” Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social. “Jared will drive NASA’s mission of discovery and inspiration, paving the way for groundbreaking achievements in space science, technology, and exploration.”

In a post on X, Isaacman said he was “honored” to receive Trump’s nomination.

“Having been fortunate to see our amazing planet from space, I am passionate about America leading the most incredible adventure in human history,” Isaacman wrote. “On my last mission to space, my crew and I traveled farther from Earth than anyone in over half a century. I can confidently say this second space age has only just begun.”

Top officials who served at NASA under President Trump and President Obama endorsed Isaacman as the next NASA boss.

“Jared Isaacman will be an outstanding NASA Administrator and leader of the NASA family,” said Jim Bridenstine, who led NASA as administrator during Trump’s first term in the White House. “Jared’s vision for pushing boundaries, paired with his proven track record of success in private industry, positions him as an ideal candidate to lead NASA into a bold new era of exploration and discovery. I urge the Senate to swiftly confirm him.”

Lori Garver, NASA’s deputy administrator during the Obama administration, wrote on X that Isaacman’s nomination was “terrific news,” adding that “he has the opportunity to build on NASA’s amazing accomplishments to pave our way to an even brighter future.”

Isaacman, 41, is the founder and CEO of Shift4, a mobile payment processing platform, and co-founded Draken International, which owns a fleet of retired fighter jets to pose as adversaries for military air combat training. If the Senate confirms his nomination, Isaacman would become the 15th NASA administrator, and the fourth who has flown in space.

Trump nominates Jared Isaacman to become the next NASA administrator Read More »

China hits US with ban on critical minerals used in tech manufacturing

biden administration, china, china tariffs, Donald Trump, export ban, Policy, rare earth metals, tech manufacturing, us-china trade war / Shannon Garcia / December 3, 2024

Although China’s response to the latest curbs was swift and seemingly strong, experts told Ars that China’s response to Biden’s last round of tariffs was relatively muted. It’s possible that this week’s ban on exports into the US could also be a response to President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to increase tariffs on all Chinese goods once he takes office.

Analysts warned Monday that new export curbs could end up hurting businesses in the US and allied nations while potentially doing very little to block China from accessing US tech. On Tuesday, four Chinese industry associations seemingly added fuel to the potential fire threatening US businesses by warning Chinese firms that purchasing US chips is “no longer safe,” Asia Financial reported.

Apparently, these groups would not say how or why the chips were unsafe, but the warning could hurt US chipmaking giants like Nvidia, AMD, and Intel, the financial industry publication closely monitoring China’s economy forecast said.

This was a “rare, coordinated move” by industry associations advising top firms in telecommunications, autos, semiconductors, and “the digital economy,” Asia Financial reported.

As US-China tensions escalate ahead of Trump’s next term, the tech industry has warned that any unpredictable rises in costs may end up spiking prices on popular consumer tech. With Trump angling to add a 35 percent tariff on all Chinese goods, that means average Americans could also end up harmed by the trade war, potentially soon paying significantly more for laptops, smartphones, and game consoles.

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Workers demand more transparency after Intel secures $8B CHIPS funding

AI chips, Chips Act, chips fabs, chips plants, Donald Trump, intel, Policy, semiconductor / Mike M. / November 26, 2024

Intel awarded nearly $8B to “supercharge” US semiconductor innovation.

An aerial view from February 2024 shows construction progress at Intel’s Ohio One campus of nearly 1,000 acres in Licking County, Ohio. Credit: Intel Corporation

On Tuesday, the Biden-Harris administration finalized a CHIPS award of up to $7.865 billion to help fund the expansion of Intel’s commercial fabs in the US. By the end of the decade, these fabs are intended to decrease reliance on foreign adversaries and fill substantial gaps in America’s domestic semiconductor supply chain.

Initially, Intel was awarded $8.5 billion, but it was decreased after Intel won a $3 billion subsidy from the Pentagon to expand Department of Defense semiconductor manufacturing. In a press release, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo boasted that the substantial award would set up “Intel to drive one of the most significant semiconductor manufacturing expansions in US history” and “supercharge American innovation” while making the US “more secure.”

For Intel, the CHIPS funding supports an expected investment of nearly $90 billion by 2030 to expand projects in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio, and Oregon. Approximately 10,000 manufacturing jobs and 20,000 construction jobs will be created “across all four states,” the Commerce Department’s press release said. Additionally, Intel estimated that the funding will create “more than 50,000 indirect jobs with suppliers and supporting industries.”

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which oversees CHIPS funding for manufacturing and research and development initiatives, the “funding will spur investment in leading-edge logic chip manufacturing, packaging, and R&D facilities.”

The sprawling effort includes the construction of two new fabs in Chandler, Arizona, the modernization of two fabs in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, building a new leading-edge logic fab in New Albany, Ohio, and creating a “premier hub of leading-edge research and development” in Hillsboro, Oregon. By the end, Intel expects to operate America’s largest advanced packaging facility in New Mexico and “one of only three locations in the world where leading-edge process technology is developed” in Oregon, NIST said.

Who’s enforcing worker safety commitments?

To succeed, Intel will need to build a talented workforce, so $65 million has been set aside to fund those efforts. The majority, $56 million, will “help train students and faculty at all education levels,” Intel said. Another $5 million will “help increase childcare availability near Intel’s facilities,” and the final $4 million will support efforts to recruit women and “economically disadvantaged individuals” as construction workers, Intel said.

Recruitment could be challenging if worker safety concerns are continually raised, though. Chips Communities United (CCU), a coalition of “labor, environmental, social justice, civil rights, and community organizations representing millions of workers and community members nationwide,” has been monitoring worker concerns at facilities receiving CHIPS funding. While the coalition fully supports Intel’s US expansion, they recently requested a full environmental impact statement at one of Intel’s Arizona fabs, detailing potential environmental and worker hazards, as well as mitigation plans.

As of August, CCU said that Ocotillo workers and communities had been given “insufficient detail on the use, storage, and release of hazardous substances, as well as other environmental impacts, to conclude that there are no significant environmental impacts.”

Workers have a bunch of questions. But perhaps most urgently, they need more information on how environmental safety commitments will be enforced, CCU suggested, because no one wants to work in constant fear of chemical exposure. Especially when Intel’s facilities in Oregon were revealed last year to have “accidentally turned off its air pollution control equipment for two months and underreported its CO₂ emissions.”

NIST noted that Intel is required to protect workers to receive CHIPS funding and has promised to meet regularly with workers and managers at each project facility to discuss worker safety concerns.

Intel could not immediately be reached for comment on whether it’s currently in discussions with workers impacted by CCU’s recent claims.

Weighing in on the Intel Community Impact Report that NIST released today, CCU applauded Intel’s commitments to bring workers to the table, adopt the “most protective health and safety standards for chemical exposure,” “segregate PFAS-containing waste for treatment and disposal,” and “make environmental compliance public when it comes to energy and water use,” CCU coalition director Judith Barish told Ars. But the enforceability of the promised workplace safety conditions remains a concern at Intel’s facilities.

“Protective workplace health and safety regulation” has “historically been missing in semiconductor production,” Barish told Ars. And it’s a big problem Intel’s current plan is to regulate the management of toxic chemicals following guidelines developed by industry—not government.

“Unlike government regulations, this standard is not easily available for public inspection since it is proprietary, copyrighted, and can only be inspected by purchasing it,” Barish told Ars. “Allowing a regulated entity to write the regulations that will be applied to it violates basic principles of good government.”

While segregating PFAS-containing waste sounds good, Barish said that workers need more transparency to understand how it “will be separated, stored, and treated and what the environmental impacts will be for nearby communities.”

It’s also unclear to workers what might happen if Intel fails to follow through on its commitments. The Commerce Department has emphasized that Intel’s funding will be disbursed “based on Intel’s completion of project milestones,” but workers “aren’t clear on the penalties or clawbacks the Commerce Dept. would impose if Intel failed to meet workforce, health and safety, or environmental milestones and metrics,” Barish said.

Intel only approved unionized workers at one site

For top talent to be attracted to Intel’s facilities, establishing the most protective safety protocols will be critical. But just as critical for workers—especially “economically disadvantaged” workers Intel is targeting for construction jobs—will be worker benefits.

Barish noted that Intel has only committed to employing unionized construction workers at one of four sites. The company may struggle to recruit workers, Barish suggested, without being clear about their rights to “join a union free from intimidation, captive audience meetings, exposure to anti-union consultants, threats of retaliation, and other obstacles to achieve bargaining.”

CCU plans to continue monitoring concerns at Intel’s fabs and others receiving CHIPS funding as the presidential administration potentially introduces CHIPS Act changes next year.

On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump attacked the CHIPS Act, saying he was “not thrilled” with the price tag, CNBC reported. However, analysts told CNBC that any changes under Trump would likely be smaller rather than something drastic like repealing the law.

The Commerce Department continues to tout the CHIPS Act as a firmly bipartisan initiative. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, whose company’s large investment depends on bipartisan support for the CHIPS Act continuing for years to come, echoed that sentiment after the award was finalized.

“With Intel 3 already in high-volume production and Intel 18A set to follow next year, leading-edge semiconductors are once again being made on American soil,” Gelsinger said. “Strong bipartisan support for restoring American technology and manufacturing leadership is driving historic investments that are critical to the country’s long-term economic growth and national security. Intel is deeply committed to advancing these shared priorities as we further expand our US operations over the next several years.”

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.

Workers demand more transparency after Intel secures $8B CHIPS funding Read More »

Trump targets Mexico and Canada with tariffs, plus an extra 10% for China

Canada, china, Donald Trump, mexico, Policy, syndication, tariffs / 9u50fv / November 26, 2024

Trump had in particular targeted Mexico on the campaign trail, threatening to impose “whatever tariffs are required—100 percent, 200 percent, 1,000 percent” to stop Chinese cars from crossing the southern border.

He has also warned Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, he would impose tariffs of 25 percent if she did not crack down on the “onslaught of criminals and drugs” crossing the border.

The levies could be imposed using executive powers that would override the USMCA, the free trade agreement Trump signed with Canada and Mexico during his first term as president.

“There’s a lot of integration of North American manufacturing in a lot of sectors, particularly autos, so this would be pretty disruptive for a lot of US companies and industries,” said Warren Maruyama, former general counsel at the Office of the US Trade Representative. “Tariffs are inflationary and will drive up prices,” he added.

Ricardo Monreal, leader of Mexico’s ruling party in the lower house of congress, said tariffs would “not solve the underlying issue” at the border. “Escalating trade retaliation would only hurt people’s pockets,” he wrote on X.

Diego Marroquín Bitar at the Wilson Center think tank warned that unilateral tariffs “would shatter confidence in USMCA and harm all three economies.”

In a joint statement, Canada’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, and public safety minister Dominic LeBlanc hailed the bilateral relationship with the US as “one of the strongest and closest… particularly when it comes to trade and border security.”

They also noted that Canada “buys more from the United States than China, Japan, France, and the UK combined,” and last year supplied “60 percent of US crude oil imports.”

“Even if this is a negotiating strategy, I don’t see what Canada has to offer that Trump is not already getting,” said Carlo Dade at the Canada West Foundation.

While Trump put tariffs at the center of his economic pitch to voters, President Joe Biden has also increased levies on Chinese imports. In May, Biden’s administration sharply increased tariffs on a range of imported clean-energy technologies, including boosting tariffs on electric vehicles from China to 100 percent.

Biden’s administration has also pushed Beijing for several years to crack down on the production of ingredients for fentanyl, which it estimated claimed the lives of almost 75,000 Americans in 2023. Beijing this year agreed to impose controls on chemicals crucial to manufacturing fentanyl following meetings with senior US officials.

Additional reporting by William Sandlund and Haohsiang Ko in Hong Kong, Christine Murray in Mexico City, Ilya Gridneff in Toronto, Joe Leahy in Beijing, and Alex Rogers in Washington.

Trump targets Mexico and Canada with tariffs, plus an extra 10% for China Read More »

The key moment came 38 minutes after Starship roared off the launch pad

Donald Trump, elon musk, Features, launch, NASA, Science, Space, spacex, Starbase, starship, Starship Flight 6, super heavy, texas, US Space Force / 9u50fv / November 20, 2024

SpaceX wasn’t able to catch the Super Heavy booster, but Starship is on the cusp of orbital flight.

The sixth flight of Starship lifts off from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site at Boca Chica Beach, Texas. Credit: SpaceX.

SpaceX launched its sixth Starship rocket Tuesday, proving for the first time that the stainless steel ship can maneuver in space and paving the way for an even larger, upgraded vehicle slated to debut on the next test flight.

The only hiccup was an abortive attempt to catch the rocket’s Super Heavy booster back at the launch site in South Texas, something SpaceX achieved on the previous flight on October 13. The Starship upper stage flew halfway around the world, reaching an altitude of 118 miles (190 kilometers) before plunging through the atmosphere for a pinpoint slow-speed splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The sixth flight of the world’s largest launcher—standing 398 feet (121.3 meters) tall—began with a lumbering liftoff from SpaceX’s Starbase facility near the US-Mexico border at 4 pm CST (22: 00 UTC) Tuesday. The rocket headed east over the Gulf of Mexico, propelled by 33 Raptor engines clustered on the bottom of its Super Heavy first stage.

A few miles away, President-elect Donald Trump joined SpaceX founder Elon Musk to witness the launch. The SpaceX boss became one of Trump’s closest allies in this year’s presidential election, giving the world’s richest man extraordinary influence in US space policy. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was there, too, among other lawmakers. Gen. Chance Saltzman, the top commander in the US Space Force, stood nearby, chatting with Trump and other VIPs.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, President-elect Donald Trump, and Gen. Chance Saltzman of the US Space Force watch the sixth launch of Starship Tuesday. Credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

From their viewing platform, they watched Starship climb into a clear autumn sky. At full power, the 33 Raptors chugged more than 40,000 pounds of super-cold liquid methane and liquid oxygen per second. The engines generated 16.7 million pounds of thrust, 60 percent more than the Soviet N1, the second-largest rocket in history.

Eight minutes later, the rocket’s upper stage, itself also known as Starship, was in space, completing the program’s fourth straight near-flawless launch. The first two test flights faltered before reaching their planned trajectory.

A brief but crucial demo

As exciting as it was, we’ve seen all that before. One of the most important new things engineers wanted to test on this flight occurred about 38 minutes after liftoff.

That’s when Starship reignited one of its six Raptor engines for a brief burn to make a slight adjustment to its flight path. The burn lasted only a few seconds, and the impulse was small—just a 48 mph (77 km/hour) change in velocity, or delta-V—but it demonstrated that the ship can safely deorbit itself on future missions.

With this achievement, Starship will likely soon be cleared to travel into orbit around Earth and deploy Starlink Internet satellites or conduct in-space refueling experiments, two of the near-term objectives on SpaceX’s Starship development roadmap.

Launching Starlinks aboard Starship will allow SpaceX to expand the capacity and reach of its commercial consumer broadband network, which, in turn, provides revenue for Musk to reinvest into Starship. Orbital refueling enables Starship voyages beyond low-Earth orbit, fulfilling SpaceX’s multibillion-dollar contract with NASA to provide a human-rated Moon lander for the agency’s Artemis program. Likewise, transferring cryogenic propellants in orbit is a prerequisite for sending Starships to Mars, making real Musk’s dream of creating a settlement on the red planet.

Artist’s illustration of Starship on the surface of the Moon. Credit: SpaceX

Until now, SpaceX has intentionally launched Starships to speeds just shy of the blistering velocities needed to maintain orbit. Engineers wanted to test the Raptor’s ability to reignite in space on the third Starship test flight in March, but the ship lost control of its orientation, and SpaceX canceled the engine firing.

Before going for a full orbital flight, officials needed to confirm that Starship could steer itself back into the atmosphere for reentry, ensuring it wouldn’t present any risk to the public with an unguided descent over a populated area. After Tuesday, SpaceX can check this off its to-do list.

“Congrats to SpaceX on Starship’s sixth test flight,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson posted on X. “Exciting to see the Raptor engine restart in space—major progress towards orbital flight. Starship’s success is Artemis’ success. Together, we will return humanity to the Moon & set our sights on Mars.”

While it lacks the pizzazz of a fiery launch or landing, the engine relight unlocks a new phase of Starship development. SpaceX has now proven that the rocket is capable of reaching space with a fair measure of reliability. Next, engineers will fine-tune how to reliably recover the booster and the ship and learn how to use them.

Acid test

SpaceX appears well on its way to doing this. While SpaceX didn’t catch the Super Heavy booster with the launch tower’s mechanical arms Tuesday, engineers have shown they can do it. The challenge of catching Starship itself back at the launch pad is more daunting. The ship starts its reentry thousands of miles from Starbase, traveling approximately 17,000 mph (27,000 km/hour), and must thread the gap between the tower’s catch arms within a matter of inches.

The good news is that SpaceX has now twice proven it can bring Starship back to a precision splashdown in the Indian Ocean. In October, the ship settled into the sea in darkness. SpaceX moved the launch time for Tuesday’s flight to the late afternoon, setting up for splashdown shortly after sunrise northwest of Australia.

The shift in time paid off with some stunning new visuals. Cameras mounted on the outside of Starship beamed dazzling live views back to SpaceX through the Starlink network, showing a now-familiar glow of plasma encasing the spacecraft as it plowed deeper into the atmosphere. But this time, daylight revealed the ship’s flaps moving to control its belly-first descent toward the ocean. After passing through a deck of low clouds, Starship reignited its Raptor engines and tilted from horizontal to vertical, making contact with the water tail-first within view of a floating buoy and a nearby aircraft in position to observe the moment.

Here’s a replay of the spacecraft’s splashdown around 65 minutes after launch.

Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting sixth flight test of Starship! pic.twitter.com/bf98Va9qmL

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 19, 2024

The ship made it through reentry despite flying with a substandard heat shield. Starship’s thermal protection system is made up of thousands of ceramic tiles to protect the ship from temperatures as high as 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius).

Kate Tice, a SpaceX engineer hosting the company’s live broadcast of the mission, said teams at Starbase removed 2,100 heat shield tiles from Starship ahead of Tuesday’s launch. Their removal exposed wider swaths of the ship’s stainless steel skin to super-heated plasma, and SpaceX teams were eager to see how well the spacecraft held up during reentry. In the language of flight testing, this approach is called exploring the corners of the envelope, where engineers evaluate how a new airplane or rocket performs in extreme conditions.

“Don’t be surprised if we see some wackadoodle stuff happen here,” Tice said. There was nothing of the sort. One of the ship’s flaps appeared to suffer some heating damage, but it remained intact and functional, and the harm looked to be less substantial than damage seen on previous flights.

Many of the removed tiles came from the sides of Starship where SpaceX plans to place catch fittings on future vehicles. These are the hardware protuberances that will catch on the top side of the launch tower’s mechanical arms, similar to fittings used on the Super Heavy booster.

“The next flight, we want to better understand where we can install catch hardware, not necessarily to actually do the catch but to see how that hardware holds up in those spots,” Tice said. “Today’s flight will help inform ‘does the stainless steel hold up like we think it may, based on experiments that we conducted on Flight 5?'”

Musk wrote on his social media platform X that SpaceX could try to bring Starship back to Starbase for a catch on the eighth test flight, which is likely to occur in the first half of 2025.

“We will do one more ocean landing of the ship,” Musk said. “If that goes well, then SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower.”

The heat shield, Musk added, is a focal point of SpaceX’s attention. The delicate heat-absorbing tiles used on the belly of the space shuttle proved vexing to NASA technicians. Early in the shuttle’s development, NASA had trouble keeping tiles adhered to the shuttle’s aluminum skin. Each of the shuttle tiles was custom-machined to fit on a specific location on the orbiter, complicating refurbishment between flights. Starship’s tiles are all hexagonal in shape and agnostic to where technicians place them on the vehicle.

“The biggest technology challenge remaining for Starship is a fully & immediately reusable heat shield,” Musk wrote on X. “Being able to land the ship, refill propellant & launch right away with no refurbishment or laborious inspection. That is the acid test.”

This photo of the Starship vehicle for Flight 6, numbered Ship 31, shows exposed portions of the vehicle’s stainless steel skin after tile removal. Credit: SpaceX

There were no details available Tuesday night on what caused the Super Heavy booster to divert from its planned catch on the launch tower. After detaching from the Starship upper stage less than three minutes into the flight, the booster reversed course to begin the journey back to Starbase.

Then SpaceX’s flight director announced the rocket would fly itself into the Gulf rather than back to the launch site: “Booster offshore divert.”

The booster finished its descent with a seemingly perfect landing burn using a subset of its Raptor engines. As expected after the water landing, the booster—itself 233 feet (71 meters) tall—toppled and broke apart in a dramatic fireball visible to onshore spectators.

In an update posted to its website after the launch, SpaceX said automated health checks of hardware on the launch and catch tower triggered the aborted catch attempt. The company did not say what system failed the health check. As a safety measure, SpaceX must send a manual command for the booster to come back to land in order to prevent a malfunction from endangering people or property.

Turning it up to 11

There will be plenty more opportunities for more booster catches in the coming months as SpaceX ramps up its launch cadence at Starbase. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, hinted at the scale of the company’s ambitions last week.

“We just passed 400 launches on Falcon, and I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years,” she said at the Barron Investment Conference.

The next batch of test flights will use an improved version of Starship designated Block 2, or V2. Starship Block 2 comes with larger propellant tanks, redesigned forward flaps, and a better heat shield.

The new-generation Starship will hold more than 11 million pounds of fuel and oxidizer, about a million pounds more than the capacity of Starship Block 1. The booster and ship will produce more thrust, and Block 2 will measure 408 feet (124.4 meters) tall, stretching the height of the full stack by a little more than 10 feet.

Put together, these modifications should give Starship the ability to heave a payload of up to 220,000 pounds (100 metric tons) into low-Earth orbit, about twice the carrying capacity of the first-generation ship. Further down the line, SpaceX plans to introduce Starship Block 3 to again double the ship’s payload capacity.

Just as importantly, these changes are designed to make it easier for SpaceX to recover and reuse the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage. SpaceX’s goal of fielding a fully reusable launcher builds on the partial reuse SpaceX pioneered with its Falcon 9 rocket. This should dramatically bring down launch costs, according to SpaceX’s vision.

With Tuesday’s flight, it’s clear Starship works. Now it’s time to see what it can do.

Updated with additional details, quotes, and images.

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.

The key moment came 38 minutes after Starship roared off the launch pad Read More »

Trump’s FCC chair is Brendan Carr, who wants to regulate everyone except ISPs

brendan carr, Donald Trump, FCC, fcc chairman, Policy / Mike M. / November 18, 2024

Trump makes FCC chair pick

Carr says he wants to punish broadcast media and dismantle “censorship cartel.”

Federal Communications Commission member Brendan Carr speaks during the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland on February 24, 2024. Credit: Getty Images | Anadolu

President-elect Donald Trump announced last night that he will make Brendan Carr the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Carr, who wrote a chapter about the FCC for the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, is a longtime opponent of net neutrality rules and other regulations imposed on Internet service providers.

Although Carr wants to deregulate telecom companies that the FCC has historically regulated, he wants the FCC to start regulating Big Tech and social media firms. He has also echoed Trump’s longtime complaints about the news media and proposed punishments for broadcast networks.

Trump’s statement on Carr said that “because of his great work, I will now be designating him as permanent Chairman.”

“Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms, and held back our Economy,” Trump wrote. “He will end the regulatory onslaught that has been crippling America’s Job Creators and Innovators, and ensure that the FCC delivers for rural America.”

Carr is a sitting FCC commissioner and therefore no Senate approval is needed to confirm the choice. The president can elevate any commissioner to the chair spot.

Carr wants to punish broadcasters

Carr thanked Trump in a post on his X account last night, then made several more posts describing some of the changes he plans to make at the FCC. One of Carr’s posts said the FCC will crack down on broadcast media.

“Broadcast media have had the privilege of using a scarce and valuable public resource—our airwaves. In turn, they are required by law to operate in the public interest. When the transition is complete, the FCC will enforce this public interest obligation,” Carr wrote.

We described Carr’s views on how the FCC should operate in an article on November 7, just after Trump’s election win. We wrote:

A Carr-led FCC could also try to punish news organizations that are perceived to be anti-Trump. Just before the election, Carr alleged that NBC putting Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live was “a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule” and that the FCC should consider issuing penalties. Despite Carr’s claim, NBC did provide equal time to the Trump campaign.

Previous chairs defended free speech

Previous FCC chairs from both major parties have avoided punishing news organizations because of free speech concerns. Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel, the current FCC chairwoman, last month criticized Trump’s calls for licenses to be revoked from TV news organizations whose coverage he dislikes.

“While repeated attacks against broadcast stations by the former President may now be familiar, these threats against free speech are serious and should not be ignored,” Rosenworcel said at the time. “As I’ve said before, the First Amendment is a cornerstone of our democracy. The FCC does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.”

Former Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican, rejected the idea of revoking licenses in 2017 after similar calls from Trump. Pai said that the FCC “under my leadership will stand for the First Amendment” and that “the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.”

Carr believes differently. After the Saturday Night Live incident, Carr told Fox News that “all remedies should be on the table,” including “license revocations” for NBC.

We’ve pointed out repeatedly that the FCC doesn’t actually license TV networks such as CBS or NBC. But the FCC could punish affiliates. The FCC’s licensing authority is over broadcast stations, many of which are affiliated with or owned by a big network.

Carr targets “censorship cartel”

Carr wrote last night that “we must dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.” This seems to be referring to making social media networks change how they moderate content. On November 15, Carr wrote that “Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft & others have played central roles in the censorship cartel,” along with fact-checking groups and ad agencies that “helped enforce one-sided narratives.”

During his first presidential term, Trump formally petitioned the FCC to reinterpret Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in a way that would limit social media platforms’ legal protections for hosting third-party content when the platforms take down content they consider objectionable.

Trump and Carr have claimed that such a step is necessary because of anti-conservative bias. In his Project 2025 chapter, Carr wrote that the FCC “should issue an order that interprets Section 230 in a way that eliminates the expansive, non-textual immunities that courts have read into the statute.”

Carr’s willingness to reinterpret Section 230 is likely a big plus in Trump’s eyes. In 2020, Trump pulled the re-nomination of FCC Republican member Michael O’Rielly after O’Rielly said that “we should all reject demands, in the name of the First Amendment, for private actors to curate or publish speech in a certain way. Like it or not, the First Amendment’s protections apply to corporate entities, especially when they engage in editorial decision making.”

Carr to end FCC diversity policies

Last night, Carr also said he would end the FCC’s embrace of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies. “The FCC’s most recent budget request said that promoting DEI was the agency’s second highest strategic goal. Starting next year, the FCC will end its promotion of DEI,” Carr wrote.

The FCC budget request said the agency “will pursue focused action and investments to eliminate historical, systemic, and structural barriers that perpetuate disadvantaged or underserved individuals and communities.” The Rosenworcel FCC said it aimed to create a diverse staff and to help “underserved individuals and communities” access “digital technologies, media, communication services, and next-generation networks.”

Carr dissented last year in the FCC’s 3-2 decision to impose rules that prohibit discrimination in access to broadband services, describing the rulemaking as “President Biden’s plan to give the administrative state effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US.”

Another major goal for Carr is forcing Big Tech firms to help subsidize broadband network construction. Carr’s Project 2025 chapter said the FCC should “require that Big Tech begin to contribute a fair share” into “the FCC’s roughly $9 billion Universal Service Fund.”

Media advocacy group Free Press said yesterday that “Brendan Carr has been campaigning for this job with promises to do the bidding of Donald Trump and Elon Musk” and “got this job because he will carry out Trump and Musk’s personal vendettas. While styling himself as a free-speech champion, Carr refused to stand up when Trump threatened to take away the broadcast licenses of TV stations for daring to fact-check him during the campaign. This alone should be disqualifying.”

Lobby groups representing Internet service providers will be happy to have an FCC chair focused on eliminating broadband regulations. USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter issued a statement saying that “Brendan Carr has been a proven leader and an important partner in our shared goal to connect all Americans. With his deep experience and expertise, Commissioner Carr clearly understands the regulatory challenges and opportunities across the communications landscape.”

Pai, who teamed up with Carr and O’Rielly to eliminate net neutrality rules in 2017, wrote that Carr “was a brilliant advisor and General Counsel and has been a superb Commissioner, and I’m confident he will be a great FCC Chairman.”

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

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OpenAI accused of trying to profit off AI model inspection in court

AI models, ai safety testing, chatgpt, copyright, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, large language models, new york times, openai, Policy, us ai safety institute / Mike M. / November 15, 2024

Experiencing some technical difficulties

How do you get an AI model to confess what’s inside?

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Since ChatGPT became an instant hit roughly two years ago, tech companies around the world have rushed to release AI products while the public is still in awe of AI’s seemingly radical potential to enhance their daily lives.

But at the same time, governments globally have warned it can be hard to predict how rapidly popularizing AI can harm society. Novel uses could suddenly debut and displace workers, fuel disinformation, stifle competition, or threaten national security—and those are just some of the obvious potential harms.

While governments scramble to establish systems to detect harmful applications—ideally before AI models are deployed—some of the earliest lawsuits over ChatGPT show just how hard it is for the public to crack open an AI model and find evidence of harms once a model is released into the wild. That task is seemingly only made harder by an increasingly thirsty AI industry intent on shielding models from competitors to maximize profits from emerging capabilities.

The less the public knows, the seemingly harder and more expensive it is to hold companies accountable for irresponsible AI releases. This fall, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI was even accused of trying to profit off discovery by seeking to charge litigants retail prices to inspect AI models alleged as causing harms.

In a lawsuit raised by The New York Times over copyright concerns, OpenAI suggested the same model inspection protocol used in a similar lawsuit raised by book authors.

Under that protocol, the NYT could hire an expert to review highly confidential OpenAI technical materials “on a secure computer in a secured room without Internet access or network access to other computers at a secure location” of OpenAI’s choosing. In this closed-off arena, the expert would have limited time and limited queries to try to get the AI model to confess what’s inside.

The NYT seemingly had few concerns about the actual inspection process but bucked at OpenAI’s intended protocol capping the number of queries their expert could make through an application programming interface to $15,000 worth of retail credits. Once litigants hit that cap, OpenAI suggested that the parties split the costs of remaining queries, charging the NYT and co-plaintiffs half-retail prices to finish the rest of their discovery.

In September, the NYT told the court that the parties had reached an “impasse” over this protocol, alleging that “OpenAI seeks to hide its infringement by professing an undue—yet unquantified—’expense.'” According to the NYT, plaintiffs would need $800,000 worth of retail credits to seek the evidence they need to prove their case, but there’s allegedly no way it would actually cost OpenAI that much.

“OpenAI has refused to state what its actual costs would be, and instead improperly focuses on what it charges its customers for retail services as part of its (for profit) business,” the NYT claimed in a court filing.

In its defense, OpenAI has said that setting the initial cap is necessary to reduce the burden on OpenAI and prevent a NYT fishing expedition. The ChatGPT maker alleged that plaintiffs “are requesting hundreds of thousands of dollars of credits to run an arbitrary and unsubstantiated—and likely unnecessary—number of searches on OpenAI’s models, all at OpenAI’s expense.”

How this court debate resolves could have implications for future cases where the public seeks to inspect models causing alleged harms. It seems likely that if a court agrees OpenAI can charge retail prices for model inspection, it could potentially deter lawsuits from any plaintiffs who can’t afford to pay an AI expert or commercial prices for model inspection.

Lucas Hansen, co-founder of CivAI—a company that seeks to enhance public awareness of what AI can actually do—told Ars that probably a lot of inspection can be done on public models. But often, public models are fine-tuned, perhaps censoring certain queries and making it harder to find information that a model was trained on—which is the goal of NYT’s suit. By gaining API access to original models instead, litigants could have an easier time finding evidence to prove alleged harms.

It’s unclear exactly what it costs OpenAI to provide that level of access. Hansen told Ars that costs of training and experimenting with models “dwarfs” the cost of running models to provide full capability solutions. Developers have noted in forums that costs of API queries quickly add up, with one claiming OpenAI’s pricing is “killing the motivation to work with the APIs.”

The NYT’s lawyers and OpenAI declined to comment on the ongoing litigation.

US hurdles for AI safety testing

Of course, OpenAI is not the only AI company facing lawsuits over popular products. Artists have sued makers of image generators for allegedly threatening their livelihoods, and several chatbots have been accused of defamation. Other emerging harms include very visible examples—like explicit AI deepfakes, harming everyone from celebrities like Taylor Swift to middle schoolers—as well as underreported harms, like allegedly biased HR software.

A recent Gallup survey suggests that Americans are more trusting of AI than ever but still twice as likely to believe AI does “more harm than good” than that the benefits outweigh the harms. Hansen’s CivAI creates demos and interactive software for education campaigns helping the public to understand firsthand the real dangers of AI. He told Ars that while it’s hard for outsiders to trust a study from “some random organization doing really technical work” to expose harms, CivAI provides a controlled way for people to see for themselves how AI systems can be misused.

“It’s easier for people to trust the results, because they can do it themselves,” Hansen told Ars.

Hansen also advises lawmakers grappling with AI risks. In February, CivAI joined the Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute Consortium—a group including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, nonprofits, and academic research teams that help to advise the US AI Safety Institute (AISI). But so far, Hansen said, CivAI has not been very active in that consortium beyond scheduling a talk to share demos.

The AISI is supposed to protect the US from risky AI models by conducting safety testing to detect harms before models are deployed. Testing should “address risks to human rights, civil rights, and civil liberties, such as those related to privacy, discrimination and bias, freedom of expression, and the safety of individuals and groups,” President Joe Biden said in a national security memo last month, urging that safety testing was critical to support unrivaled AI innovation.

“For the United States to benefit maximally from AI, Americans must know when they can trust systems to perform safely and reliably,” Biden said.

But the AISI’s safety testing is voluntary, and while companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have agreed to the voluntary testing, not every company has. Hansen is worried that AISI is under-resourced and under-budgeted to achieve its broad goals of safeguarding America from untold AI harms.

“The AI Safety Institute predicted that they’ll need about $50 million in funding, and that was before the National Security memo, and it does not seem like they’re going to be getting that at all,” Hansen told Ars.

Biden had $50 million budgeted for AISI in 2025, but Donald Trump has threatened to dismantle Biden’s AI safety plan upon taking office.

The AISI was probably never going to be funded well enough to detect and deter all AI harms, but with its future unclear, even the limited safety testing the US had planned could be stalled at a time when the AI industry continues moving full speed ahead.

That could largely leave the public at the mercy of AI companies’ internal safety testing. As frontier models from big companies will likely remain under society’s microscope, OpenAI has promised to increase investments in safety testing and help establish industry-leading safety standards.

According to OpenAI, that effort includes making models safer over time, less prone to producing harmful outputs, even with jailbreaks. But OpenAI has a lot of work to do in that area, as Hansen told Ars that he has a “standard jailbreak” for OpenAI’s most popular release, ChatGPT, “that almost always works” to produce harmful outputs.

The AISI did not respond to Ars’ request to comment.

NYT “nowhere near done” inspecting OpenAI models

For the public, who often become guinea pigs when AI acts unpredictably, risks remain, as the NYT case suggests that the costs of fighting AI companies could go up while technical hiccups could delay resolutions. Last week, an OpenAI filing showed that NYT’s attempts to inspect pre-training data in a “very, very tightly controlled environment” like the one recommended for model inspection were allegedly continuously disrupted.

“The process has not gone smoothly, and they are running into a variety of obstacles to, and obstructions of, their review,” the court filing describing NYT’s position said. “These severe and repeated technical issues have made it impossible to effectively and efficiently search across OpenAI’s training datasets in order to ascertain the full scope of OpenAI’s infringement. In the first week of the inspection alone, Plaintiffs experienced nearly a dozen disruptions to the inspection environment, which resulted in many hours when News Plaintiffs had no access to the training datasets and no ability to run continuous searches.”

OpenAI was additionally accused of refusing to install software the litigants needed and randomly shutting down ongoing searches. Frustrated after more than 27 days of inspecting data and getting “nowhere near done,” the NYT keeps pushing the court to order OpenAI to provide the data instead. In response, OpenAI said plaintiffs’ concerns were either “resolved” or discussions remained “ongoing,” suggesting there was no need for the court to intervene.

So far, the NYT claims that it has found millions of plaintiffs’ works in the ChatGPT pre-training data but has been unable to confirm the full extent of the alleged infringement due to the technical difficulties. Meanwhile, costs keep accruing in every direction.

“While News Plaintiffs continue to bear the burden and expense of examining the training datasets, their requests with respect to the inspection environment would be significantly reduced if OpenAI admitted that they trained their models on all, or the vast majority, of News Plaintiffs’ copyrighted content,” the court filing 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.

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Trump says Elon Musk will lead “DOGE,” a new Department of Government Efficiency

department of government efficiency, doge, Donald Trump, elon musk, Policy / Kelly Newman / November 13, 2024

Trump’s “perfect gift to America”

Trump’s statement said the department, whose name is a reference to the Doge meme, “will drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout our annual $6.5 Trillion Dollars of Government Spending.” Trump said DOGE will “liberate our Economy” and that its “work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026” because “a smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence.”

“I look forward to Elon and Vivek making changes to the Federal Bureaucracy with an eye on efficiency and, at the same time, making life better for all Americans,” Trump said. Today, Musk wrote that the “world is suffering slow strangulation by overregulation,” and that “we finally have a mandate to delete the mountain of choking regulations that do not serve the greater good.”

Musk has been expected to have influence in Trump’s second term after campaigning for him. Trump previously vowed to have Musk head a government efficiency commission. “That would essentially give the world’s richest man and a major government contractor the power to regulate the regulators who hold sway over his companies, amounting to a potentially enormous conflict of interest,” said a New York Times article last month.

The Wall Street Journal wrote today that “Musk isn’t expected to become an official government employee, meaning he likely wouldn’t be required to divest from his business empire.”

Trump says Elon Musk will lead “DOGE,” a new Department of Government Efficiency Read More »

Bitcoin hits record high as Trump vows to end crypto crackdown

Bitcoin, crypto scams, Cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency platform, Donald Trump, Policy, wlfi, world liberty financial / Kelly Newman / November 12, 2024

Bitcoin hit a new record high late Monday, its value peaking at $89,623 as investors quickly moved to cash in on expectations that Donald Trump will end a White House crackdown that intensified last year on crypto.

While the trading rally has now paused, analysts predict that bitcoin’s value will only continue rising following Trump’s win—perhaps even reaching $100,000 by the end of 2024, CNBC reported.

Bitcoin wasn’t the only winner emerging from the post-election crypto trading. Crypto exchanges like Coinbase also experienced surges in the market, and one of the biggest winners, CNBC reported, was dogecoin, a cryptocurrency linked to Elon Musk, who campaigned for Trump and may join his administration. Dogecoin’s value is up 135 percent since Trump’s win.

On the campaign trail, Trump began wooing the cryptocurrency industry, seeking donations and votes by promising to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet,” Fortune reported. He announced the launch of his own crypto platform, World Liberty Financial (WLFI), and vowed to “fire” Gary Gensler—the Securities and Commission Exchange (SEC) chair leading the US crypto crackdown—on “day one” in office, Al Jazeera reported.

Whether Trump can actually fire Gensler is still up in the air, The Washington Post reported. It seems more likely that Trump may demote Gensler, The Post reported, since people familiar with the matter suggested that “fully outing” the current SEC chair “could trigger a novel and complicated legal battle over the president’s authorities.” So far, Gensler has made no indications that he will step down once Trump takes office, although The Post noted that wouldn’t be considered unusual.

Sources told The Post that Trump is considering “a mix of current regulators, former federal officials, and financial industry executives,” for leadership positions, “many of whom have publicly expressed pro-crypto views.”

Reportedly under consideration to replace Gensler are Daniel Gallagher, a former SEC official currently serving as chief legal officer for the financial technology firm Robinhood, and two Republican SEC commissioners, Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda, The Post’s sources said. Other names in the mix include a former SEC commissioner, Paul Atkins, and a former commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Chris Giancarlo.

Bitcoin hits record high as Trump vows to end crypto crackdown Read More »