Technology

For as long as there have been video games, there have been people willing to find ways to cheat. Hobbyists have long dedicated themselves to finding vulnerabilities in games, often with the goal of developing cheats that they could share or sell. But ever since online competitive gaming became a legitimate profession, that hobby-hacking has morphed into an entire industry that aims to sell an unfair advantage to those willing to pay.

The first production satellites for Amazon's Kuiper broadband network launched earlier this week, but if you tuned in to the mission's official livestream, the truncated coverage had the feel of a spy satellite launch.

A recently released Google AI model scores worse on certain safety tests than its predecessor, according to the company’s internal benchmarking.

OpenAI says it’ll make changes to the way it updates the AI models that power ChatGPT, following an incident that caused the platform to become overly sycophantic for many users.

Increased tariffs cost Apple $900 million last quarter, the company said when it announced solid first quarter results.

The White House released a "skinny" version of its budget proposal for fiscal year 2026 on Friday, including financial information for all federal agencies. A "skinny" budget simply means that while the document contains top-line numbers for agencies and their programs, it does not provide much in the way of specific allocations.

In the nearly two months since former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space, the billionaire has not said much publicly about his plans for the launch company. However, his intentions for Relativity now appear to be increasingly clear: He wants to have the capability to launch a significant amount of computing infrastructure into space.

Welcome to Edition 7.42 of the Rocket Report! For about a decade now, we've been following the development of the Starbase facility in South Texas. Up until 2019, progress was slow, but then the Starship program kicked into high gear, and SpaceX built up a production site beneath tents. The area has come a long way since then, and as soon as this weekend, there may be a new municipality, Starbase, in Texas.

Apple CEO Tim Cook offered the company’s first comments on the impact of President Trump’s tariffs during Thursday’s second-quarter earnings call with investors. While the iPhone maker saw only “limited impact” from tariffs in the March quarter, Cook said Apple couldn’t forecast what that would mean for the coming quarter. However, if things remained the same, the company estimates tariffs will only add $900 million to its costs in Q3.

Mach Industries, the defense tech founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, is about to close a fresh $100 million in financing co-led by new investor Khosla and existing investor Bedrock Capital, a source familiar with the deal tells TechCrunch.

Anthropic on Thursday launched a new way to connect apps and tools to its AI chatbot Claude, as well as an expanded “deep research” capability that allows Claude to search the web, enterprise accounts, and more.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is pissed off at Apple. Really, really pissed off.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is pissed off at Apple. Really, really pissed off.

Autonomous vehicle technology startup Aurora Innovation says it has successfully launched a self-driving truck service in Texas, making it the first company to deploy driverless, heavy-duty trucks for commercial use on public roads in the U.S. 

NASA's Psyche spacecraft, located nearly 150 million miles from Earth on the way to an unexplored metal asteroid, has stopped firing its engines after detecting a problem in its propulsion system.

An executive cautioned during Microsoft’s earnings call on Wednesday that customers might face AI service disruptions as demand outstrips the company’s ability to bring data centers online.

Amazon wants companies to build public-facing chatbots using its Q Business assistant.

A couple of weeks ago, ground teams at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida removed one of the four main engines from the Space Launch System rocket slated to send four astronauts on a voyage around the Moon next year.

The US Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday advanced the nomination of private astronaut and businessman Jared Isaacman as the next administrator of NASA to the Senate floor, setting up the final step before he is confirmed.

Anthropic agrees with the U.S. government that implementing robust export controls on domestically made AI chips will help the U.S. compete in the AI race against China. But the company is suggesting a few tweaks to the proposed restrictions.

Google on Tuesday is releasing three new AI experiments aimed at helping people learn to speak a new language in a more personalized way. While the experiments are still in the early stages, it’s possible that the company is looking to take on Duolingo with the help of Gemini, Google’s multimodal large language model.

On Tuesday, Meta held its first-ever AI developer conference, LlamaCon, at its Menlo Park, California headquarters. The company announced the launch of a consumer-facing Meta AI chatbot app, which will compete with ChatGPT, as well as a developer-facing API for accessing Llama models in the cloud.

AI cheating startup Cluely went viral last week with bold claims that its hidden in-browser window is “undetectable” and can be used to “cheat on everything” from job interviews to exams.

CaaStle, the embattled fashion startup whose board of directors accused its founder, Christine Hunsicke, of financial misconduct, is starting to face lawsuits from a partner and a supplier over missed payments and more allegations of fraud.

Firefly Aerospace launched its two-stage Alpha rocket from California early Tuesday, but something went wrong about two-and-a-half minutes into the flight, rendering the rocket unable to deploy an experimental satellite into orbit for Lockheed Martin.

The first 27 satellites in Amazon’s effort to create a space-based internet network have finally made it to orbit, paving the way for the company to attempt to compete with Elon Musk’s well-established Starlink service.

After integrating Meta AI into WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger, Meta is rolling out a standalone AI app. Unveiled at Meta’s LlamaCon event on Tuesday, this app allows users to access Meta AI in a standalone app, similar to the ChatGPT app and other AI assistant apps.

The first 27 operational satellites for Amazon's Kuiper broadband network lifted off from Florida's Space Coast on Monday evening, the opening salvo in a challenge to SpaceX's dominant Starlink global Internet service.

A mysterious investor out of London has asked a bankruptcy judge in Delaware to stop the sale of EV startup Canoo’s assets to its CEO, calling it a “flawed” process.

Not many people celebrate their birthday by burning a fiery arc through the atmosphere, pulling 4.4gs in freefall back to planet Earth, thudding into the ground, and emptying their stomach on the steppes of Kazakhstan.

Quantum computing has long been announced as “just around the corner,” but several companies are now determined to make this a commercial reality, with the promise of solving complex problems beyond classical computers’ reach.

In Silicon Valley, where the same high-wattage names tend to dominate the headlines, Ali Partovi has long wielded outsized influence despite limited name recognition. The Iranian-born Harvard graduate built an impressive resume early on — joining the founding team of LinkExchange (acquired by Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million), co-founding iLike (sold to MySpace for a reported $20 million in 2009), and launching the educational nonprofit Code.org with his twin brother Hadi. Together, they also became early investors in tech giants like Facebook, Airbnb, and Dropbox.

Nestled between an elementary school and a public library in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood sits a new kind of “luxury” coworking space. 

If you’re someone who likes to bookmark a bunch of things that you find interesting or want to come back to later, it can be hard to manage everything you have saved. There are a number of great bookmark apps on the market that can help you organize all these sorts of links, articles, and whatever else you come across on your mobile phone and browser. 

Move over, PayPal mafia: There’s a new tech mafia in Silicon Valley. As the startup behind ChatGPT, OpenAI is arguably the biggest AI player in town. Its meteoric rise to a $300 billion valuation has spurred many employees to leave the AI giant to create startups of their own.

Perhaps no one in the world has made such catastrophic tech flubs this year as U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

The US military launched a long-range hypersonic missile Friday morning from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on a test flight that, if successful, could pave the way for the weapon's operational deployment later this year.

In the battle between two “agentic” coding tools — Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex CLI — the latter appears to be fostering more developer goodwill than the former. That’s at least partly because Anthropic has issued takedown notices to a developer trying to reverse-engineer Claude Code, which is under a more restrictive usage license than Codex CLI.

Welcome to Edition 7.41 of the Rocket Report! NASA and its contractors at Kennedy Space Center in Florida continue building a new mobile launch tower for the Space Launch System Block 1B rocket, a taller, upgraded version of the SLS rocket being used for the agency's initial Artemis lunar missions. Workers stacked another segment of the tower a couple of weeks ago, and the structure is inching closer to its full height of 355 feet (108 meters). But this is just the start. Once the tower is fully assembled, it must be outfitted with miles of cabling, tubing, and piping, then tested before it can support an SLS launch campaign. Last year, NASA's inspector general projected the tower won't be ready for a launch until the spring of 2029 and its costs could reach $2.7 billion. The good news, if you can call it that, is there probably won't be an SLS Block 1B rocket that needs to use it in 2029, whether it's due to delays or cancellation.

It turns out that decentralized social networks can go down, too.

In an era of reusable rockets and near-daily access to space, NASA is still paying more than it did 30 years ago to launch missions into orbit, according to a study soon to be published in the scientific journal Acta Astronautica.

Data centers to train and run AI may soon contain millions of chips, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and require power equivalent to a large city’s electricity grid, if the current trends hold.

As the F1 grid reshuffles, Carlos Sainz finds himself at a critical juncture. Speculation swirls about his next destination and how he will navigate the shifting landscape.

Stay informed with sharp, clear insights on business, tech, economy, and sustainability — always relevant. Stay informed with sharp, clear insights on business, tech, economy, and sustainability — always relevant. Stay informed with sharp, clear insights on business, tech, economy, and sustainability — always relevant.

Stay informed with sharp, clear insights on business, tech, economy, and sustainability — always relevant.

Stay informed with sharp, clear insights on business, tech, economy, and sustainability — always relevant.