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Elon Musk Just Caused a Huge Headache for the New Head of NASA

SpaceX CEO and unelected White House advisor Elon Musk unexpectedly said today that he wants the International Space Station destroyed "as soon as possible." In a tweet today, the mercurial entrepreneur asserted that it's "time to begin preparations for deorbiting the space station," arguing that "it has served its purpose," with "very little incremental utility." Instead, Musk argued, the station should be destroyed within two years — but left the final decision "up to the President." It's a

Aqara Smart Lock U300 drops to its all-time low price, and I bought it!

I have been looking at smart locks for some time, and just a few days ago, I posted a couple of deals on options from Aqara and eufy. Well, I made up my mind! I pulled the trigger on the Aqara Smart Lock U300, and the deal is still on, so you can take advantage of it, too. It’s $50 off, which brings the cost down to $179.99. Get the Aqara Aqara Smart Lock U300 for $179.99 ($50 off) This offer is available from Amazon, and it is labeled as a “limited time deal.” It’s available in Black and Silve

How to make the most of the iPhone's Action Button

The Action button is available on nearly every iPhone Apple sells, offering a quick way to access a feature, app or shortcut on your phone, just by pushing a button. It can be a flashlight, activate a smart home routine or let you access any number of custom shortcuts without having to unlock your phone and pick through apps. Apple added the Action Button on the iPhone 15 Pro as a replacement for the iPhone's original Ring / Silent switch, and it was an acknowledgement of sorts that lots of peo

Putin Dangles a Nuclear Arms Treaty While Accusing Ukraine of ‘Hysteria’

The last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia will expire in February 2026. While answering questions in St. Petersburg, Russian President Vladimir Putin dangled the possibility of extending it. The cost of the nuclear arms control treaty was subtle but clear. Putin wants everyone to ignore Kyiv’s “hysteria” over not being part of the negotiations for the end of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) is an Obama-era treaty betwe

How to Watch Team USA vs. Canada in the NHL 4 Nations Face-Off Tonight

When is the 4 Nations Face-Off final between USA vs. Canada? Thursday, Feb. 20, at 8 p.m. ET (5 p.m. PT). Where to watch Team USA vs. Canada? The game will air on ESPN and stream on ESPN Plus. Hockey fans are getting what they wanted: a rematch between the US and Canada in the NHL's 4 Nations Face-Off final. Team USA won the round-robin match-up between the two hockey rivals that featured three fights in the first 9 seconds of the game. Now, the two will meet again for the championship of th

Building semiconductor plants in the US takes twice as long, costs twice as much as in Taiwan

The big picture: The U.S. and many Western markets are simply not as efficient as Taiwan in building semiconductor fabrication (fab) operations. According to reports, 18 new fab construction projects are planned for 2025 alone, making it crucial to address these challenges. The West must streamline fab construction processes to catch up with the well-established semiconductor ecosystems of Taiwan and other Asian manufacturing hubs. TSMC encountered significant challenges when it began construct

New Windows 11 preview build improves privacy for European users

In a nutshell: Microsoft recently announced a new Windows 11 Insider Preview Build for the Dev and Beta Channels, providing beta testers with new features and privacy-abiding changes. Redmond uses Insider builds to test potentially disruptive changes to Windows, so we will have to wait to see if these improvements will become permanently added to upcoming stable Windows releases. The Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.3281 (KB5052086) removes the Location History API, a feature previously u

Milliseconds to breach: How patch automation closes attackers’ fastest loophole

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The cyber resilience playbook: Navigating the new era of threats.” Read more from this special issue here. Procrastinating about patching has killed more networks and damaged more companies than any zero-day exploit or advanced cyberattack. Complacency kills — and carries a high price. Down-rev (having old patches in place that are “down revision”) or no patching at all is how ransomware gets installed, data breaches occur and companies are

Your Google Assistant-integrated headphones are losing this convenient hands-free feature

TL;DR Last September, Google disabled automatic Assistant notification reading on the Pixel Buds Pro. Now Google is doing the same for Assistant with all headphones. You can still hear your notifications by manually asking Assistant to read them. Headphones paired with smartphones offer a whole lot more than just a private way to listen to music, and especially when headphones are integrated with Google Assistant, they instantly become powerful tools for interacting with our phones. While you

Apple emerges as likely buyer for UFO disclosure film from ‘Top Gun’ producer

If aliens exist, Apple may be about to tell the origin story of how we found out… Deadline exclusively reports that Apple Original Films is the likely suitor for an upcoming movie centered around UFO disclosure. The untitled sci-fi (fiction, debatable) film is expected to focus on events in recent years around the U.S. government’s disclosure of previously classified footage of what is now called a UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena or unidentified anomalous phenomena). For years, the stigma su

Amazon will take full creative control of the James Bond franchise

Time (and perhaps a large check or two) heals all wounds. Amazon and the longtime producers and custodians of the James Bond movies have finally agreed on a way forward for the series. Amazon MGM Studios will form a joint venture with Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli that will hold the intellectual property rights and ensure they remain co-owners of the franchise. However, Wilson and Broccoli will be stepping back to focus on other projects, with Amazon gaining full creative control. The

US healthcare org pays $11M settlement over alleged cybersecurity lapses

Health Net Federal Services (HNFS) and its parent company, Centene Corporation, have agreed to pay $11,253,400 to settle allegations that HNFS falsely certified compliance with cybersecurity requirements under its Defense Health Agency (DHA) TRICARE contract. The U.S. government contracted HNFS to provide managed healthcare support services for TRICARE's North region, covering 22 states. The contract required compliance with cybersecurity standards, specifically 48 C.F.R. § 252.204-7012 and 51

Apiiro unveils free scanner to detect malicious code merges

Security researchers at Apiiro have released two free, open-source tools designed to detect and block malicious code before they are added to software projects to curb supply chain attacks. The two tools consist of a comprehensive ruleset for Semgrep and Opengrep designed to detect malicious code patterns with minimal false positives and PRevent, a GitHub-integrated scanner, that detects and alerts on suspicious code in pull requests (PRs). According to Apiiro's security researcher Matan Gilad

Switching to LED lightbulbs saved me hundreds of dollars - but there are 5 other reasons to do it

Vladimir Sukhachev/Getty Images As a kid, I was inspired by the decorative lighting in my grandparents' finished basement. They had festooned the place with multicolored C9 string lights (aka old-school Christmas lights) from wall to wall, beneath the built-in wet bar, around hanging mirrors, and anywhere else they could add an ambient accent for the parties they hosted down there year-round. Since then, I've festooned every home I've lived in with decorative lighting, whether in a sequestered

I changed these 11 iPhone settings and improved its battery life dramatically

Kerry Wan/ZDNET With the way we use our iPhones these days, it can be hard to make it through a single day on a full charge. A few FaceTime calls, some text messaging, and opening Maps a few times, and you could already be 25% down. If you've experienced this problem, you're not alone. These phones can be very power-hungry -- even the more affordable iPhone SE 4 has battery issues. The problem is made worse by all the different apps, features, and settings vying for battery life. And the kicke

Treasury agrees to block DOGE's access to personal taxpayer data at IRS

The Trump White House and Treasury Department officials have agreed to prohibit the U.S. DOGE Service from accessing personal taxpayer data, according to two people familiar with the arrangement, heading off a brewing privacy crisis at the tax agency. Gavin Kliger, a software engineer with Elon Musk’s DOGE effort assigned to the IRS, will have read-only access to anonymized tax data, the same access granted to academic researchers and IT professionals who work on IRS systems, said the people, wh

You can’t build a moat with AI (redux)

Last spring, we wrote an article called You can’t build a moat with AI. That post argued that prompt engineering, while important, would be difficult to defend over time given how easy it is to experiment with LLMs. As a result, you have to focus on the quality of data your application has access to and your use of that data to differentiate yourself. Everything we said in that post has held true, but the release of models like DeepSeek R1 and o3-mini have brought the concerns about AI applicat

Customizable HTML Select

Una Kravets Styling form controls like the <select> element has been reported as a top developer pain point for years, and we've been working on a solution. While this work is complex and has taken a long time to get right, we're getting very close to landing this feature. A customizable version of the select element is officially in Stage 2 in the WHATWG, with strong cross-browser interest and a prototype for you to test out from Chrome Canary 130. Try it out and give us your feedback Check

Five Kinds of Nondeterminism

February 19, 2025 Five Kinds of Nondeterminism Or four kinds, or six kinds, I'm not picky about how you count them No newsletter next week, I'm teaching a TLA+ workshop. Speaking of which: I spend a lot of time thinking about formal methods (and TLA+ specifically) because it's where the source of almost all my revenue. But I don't share most of the details because 90% of my readers don't use FM and never will. I think it's more interesting to talk about ideas from FM that would be useful to

Launch HN: Confident AI (YC W25) – Open-source evaluation framework for LLM apps

Hi HN - we're Jeffrey and Kritin, and we're building Confident AI ( https://confident-ai.com ). This is the cloud platform for DeepEval ( https://github.com/confident-ai/deepeval ), our open-source package that helps engineers evaluate and unit-test LLM applications. Think Pytest for LLMs. We spent the past year building DeepEval with the goal of providing the best LLM evaluation developer experience, growing it to run over 600K evaluations daily in CI/CD pipelines of enterprises like BCG, Astr

After 20 years, math couple solves major group theory problem

After the conjecture was posed in the 1970s, dozens of mathematicians tried their hand at proving it. They made partial progress — and in the process they learned a great deal about groups, which are abstract objects that describe the various symmetries of a mathematical system. But a full proof seemed out of reach. Then Späth came along. Now, 20 years after she first learned about the problem and more than a decade after she met Cabanes, the two mathematicians have finally completed the proof.

Microsoft Says It's Made a Major Quantum Computing Breakthrough With New Chip

The race to shape the future of computing is heating up among tech companies, with Microsoft saying on Wednesday it has made a major breakthrough in quantum computing, potentially paving the way for the technology to address complex scientific and societal challenges. Scientists at the tech giant have spent 17 years developing a new material and framework for quantum computing to help power its new Majorana 1 processor. Microsoft is calling the advancement the world's first quantum processor po

Elon Musk recommends that the International Space Station be deorbited ASAP

In a remarkable statement Thursday, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the International Space Station should be deorbited "as soon as possible." This comment from Musk will surely set off a landmine in the global space community, with broad implications. And it appears to be no idle comment from Musk who, at times, indulges in deliberately provocative posts on the social media network X that he owns. However, that does not seem to be the case here. "It is time to begin preparations for deorbiting

Apple, Lenovo lead losers in laptop repairability analysis

Apple and Lenovo had the lowest laptop repairability scores in an analysis of recently released devices from consumer advocacy group US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund. While Apple's low marks are partially due the difficulty involved in disassembling MacBooks, Lenovo appears to be withholding information from shoppers deemed critical to right-to-repair legislation and accessibility. The report, US PIRG's fourth annual “Failing the Fix” [PDF], calculated repairability score

ISP sued by record labels agrees to identify 100 users accused of piracy

Cable company Altice agreed to give Warner and other record labels the names and contact information of 100 broadband subscribers who were accused of pirating songs. The subscribers "were the subject of RIAA or third party copyright notices," said a court order that approved the agreement between Altice and the plaintiff record companies. Altice is notifying each subscriber "of Altice's intent to disclose their name and contact information to Plaintiffs pursuant to this Order," and telling the

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti review: An RTX 4080 for $749, at least in theory

Nvidia's RTX 50-series makes its first foray below the $1,000 mark starting this week, with the $749 RTX 5070 Ti—at least in theory. The third-fastest card in the Blackwell GPU lineup, the 5070 Ti is still far from "reasonably priced" by historical standards (the 3070 Ti was $599 at launch). But it's also $50 cheaper and a fair bit faster than the outgoing 4070 Ti Super and the older 4070 Ti. These are steps in the right direction, if small ones. We'll talk more about its performance shortly,

Topics: 4k 5070 card rtx ti

Microsoft’s new AI agent can control software and robots

On Wednesday, Microsoft Research introduced Magma, an integrated AI foundation model that combines visual and language processing to control software interfaces and robotic systems. If the results hold up outside of Microsoft's internal testing, it could mark a meaningful step forward for an all-purpose multimodal AI that can operate interactively in both real and digital spaces. Microsoft claims that Magma is the first AI model that not only processes multimodal data (like text, images, and vi

Work Has Given Me Tech Neck. This Device Is Helping Undo the Damage

I was leaving a blissful session with my massage therapist when she pointed out something unexpected: I was developing an ever-so-slight neck “hump.” Of course, nobody wants to hear that—it sounds unsightly—but it also raised some alarm bells. Recently, an orthopedic spine surgeon told me that he’s seen increasing cases of arthritis in young, healthy individuals, likely due to posture issues caused by constant screen use. Like most desk workers, I spend at least 30 hours a week glued to my lapt

USDA Layoffs Derail Projects Benefiting American Farmers

The widespread layoff of Department of Agriculture scientists has thrown vital research into disarray, according to former and current employees of the agency. Scientists hit by the layoffs were working on projects to improve crops, defend against pests and disease, and understand the climate impact of farming practices. The layoffs also threaten to undermine billions of taxpayer dollars paid to farmers to support conservation practices, experts warn. The USDA layoffs are part of the Trump admi

Netflix Plans to Spend $1 Billion Making Content in Mexico Over the Next 4 Years

Streaming juggernaut Netflix plans to spend $1 billion on film and TV production in Mexico over the next four years. CEO Ted Sarandos announced the plan Thursday during a press conference with Mexico's president, Claudia Sheinbaum. The injection of capital could fund 20 productions per year, on average. During Thursday's event, Netflix also announced a $2 million investment in Mexico City's Churubusco Studios to improve the facilities. The goal is to strengthen the national film industry. “Our