Monday, 15 June
19:00 EDT
FBI Issues Urgent Kali365 Security Warning For Teams, Outlook, OneDrive Users [Slashdot]
alternative_right shares a report from The Hill: The FBI released an urgent security warning to the public about a fast-acting scam targeting Microsoft 365 users on Teams, Outlook and OneDrive. The agency warned that the hacking platform Kali365 seeks out OAuth device codes, allowing scammers to sneak past multi-factor authentication codes, and without the need for a password, to access Microsoft accounts. Scammers will send a phishing email impersonating a trusted document-sharing service with a device code and instructions on how to verify, according to the FBI. "Kali365 lowers the barrier of entry, providing less-technical attackers access to AI-generated phishing lures, automated campaign templates, real-time targeted individual/entity tracking dashboards, and OAuth token capture capabilities," the FBI stated. The platform is sold to scammers with a $250 per month subscription. The FBI, which first detected Kali365 in April, described the hacking platform as an "emerging Phishing-as-a-Service platform." Hackers with limited skills can access advanced phishing tools through the platform, according to NordPass.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
18:00 EDT
Heart protection from COVID shots remains amid updates, study finds [Ars Technica - All content]
Although most Americans have eschewed seasonal COVID-19 vaccines, the updated shots continue to show significant protection against cardiovascular disease, especially for those over age 75 and those with underlying medical conditions. That's according to a new study that pulled data from more than 1 million patients in a US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health system.
The finding builds on previous data showing that the vaccines significantly lower the risk of COVID-19-associated cardiovascular risks, particularly heart attacks and strokes. But it wasn't a given that the benefit would hold up over time—as the virus evolved, the vaccines were updated, population-level immunity increased from previous infection and vaccination, and risk of severe outcomes fell.
The new study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that the 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine continued to protect against COVID-19-associated "major adverse cardiovascular events" (MACE), which include cardiovascular death, heart attack, stroke, and hospitalization for heart failure.
UK to ban social media for kids under 16, may impose overnight curfews [Ars Technica - All content]
The UK government announced today that it will ban social media for all kids under the age of 16 in rules expected to take effect in spring 2027. The ban will apply to platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X.
"We’re going further than any country in the world by banning social media for under-16s and putting wider protections in place to give kids their childhood back," Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in the announcement.
In addition to the ban on social media, Starmer's government said it will impose "world-leading blocks on harmful functions such as livestreaming and stranger communication with children for under-16s... Restrictions on these functionalities will also be on by default for 16- and 17-year-olds to prevent a cliff-edge at 16." The livestreaming and stranger-contact rules would apply to a range of services, such as online gaming.
SpaceX is worth $63/share according to the most expert experts [Philip Greenspun’s Weblog]
How’s SpaceX doing on its second trading day? The most expert experts on stocks in the United States work at Morningstar. They value the company at $63/share and say that if everything went perfect, it could be worth $154. From last week:
We value SpaceX SPCX at $63 per share, a 53% discount to the upcoming IPO’s offering price. Our valuation is the result of mathematics more than skepticism. With such a wide range of possible outcomes for the company’s financial future, we created forecasts and valuations for three scenarios and probability-weighted them.
Even at $63 per share, we give SpaceX a lot of benefit of the doubt in two of the three scenarios, in which we assume the company can achieve a rapidly reusable Starship rocket enabling multiple launches per week and successfully commercialize data centers in space. Neither of these engineering problems has been solved, and we don’t expect them to be until at least 2028.
In our most optimistic “moonshot” scenario, the company would be worth $1.97 trillion, or $154 a share. That’s 14% above the offering price and a level the shares might even reach in the short term after their public launch, given widespread investor enthusiasm about SpaceX, artificial intelligence infrastructure, and the IPO. However, we assign this scenario, in which both Starship is reusable and scaled orbital data centers are highly successful, a 7% chance of happening, which is one reason our final fair value estimate of $63 is much lower than $154.
We could try to figure out how accurate Morningstar was with Tesla when Tesla was the same size ($19 billion/year in revenue) as SpaceX is now. That takes us back to 2018. Tesla stock was at $20/share vs. $400 now (adjusted for 15:1 in splits, but not for Bidenflation). ChatGPT:
Morningstar was not recommending Tesla as a buy in 2018. In ordinary buy/hold/sell language, their view was closer to sell/avoid for much of the year, or at least don’t buy at the market price. … Morningstar’s 2018 stance was “don’t buy”; in buy/hold/sell terms, it was closer to “sell” than “hold,” especially around the August 2018 $420 buyout episode.
(Keep in mind that $420 pre-splits was a $28/share offer in terms of today’s shares.)
Democrats such as Bernie Sanders who are envious that Elon Musk is a trillionaire now have a Science-based way to catch up. They say that expert advice should be followed without question, e.g., if an expert-crafted response to a virus killing Americans at a median age of 82 is to close schools for 8-year-olds for 18 months. A leveraged bet that SpaceX stock will fall to the Morningstar-estimated value could make at least $billions if not $trillions in profit.
Loosely related…
The post SpaceX is worth $63/share according to the most expert experts appeared first on Philip Greenspun’s Weblog.
Google Chrome's Next Update Will Mark the End of Popular Ad Blockers [Slashdot]
Google is removing Chrome's last remaining workarounds for Manifest V2 extensions, effectively ending support for legacy ad blockers such as the original uBlock Origin. 9to5Google reports: CyberNews points out a Chromium commit that removes support for the "kExtensionManifestV2Disabled" flag, which is referred to as "dead code" seeing as Chrome no longer supports Manifest V2 extensions. This removal acts as the final stop for many Manifest V2-based ad blocker extensions that were still in use today -- the flag was effectively a loophole to continue using these extensions. A Googler on the commit explains: "MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in any supported version of Chrome, and we are removing support for them and the associated functionality. We won't be able to provide / maintain this functionality indefinitely due to the complexity and tech debt, as well as the security risks it entails (we've actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately). Of course, other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire." This will also impact other Chromium-based browsers, though the comment notes that "other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire." Neowin points out that Microsoft Edge and Opera are likely to follow suit. Chrome 150, set to be released later this month, will remove this flag, while other leftover bits of Manifest V2 will be removed in the v151 release.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
17:00 EDT
Users Cry Foul After AMD Stripped Memory Crypto From Its Consumer CPUs [Slashdot]
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A decade ago, AMD added a protection to its high-end CPUs to protect them against cold boot attacks and other types of physical exploits that siphon sensitive data out of the connected memory chips. Short for Transparent Secure Memory Encryption, TSME encrypts the entire contents stored in memory, making the data useless to physical attackers. Over time, AMD added TSME to lower-end processors, including the consumer version of its Ryzen chips, a CPU that costs less than the Pro version. Over the years, users of these lower-end chips have gotten used to the added security. Recently and without warning or notice, this lower-end line of AMD chips suddenly dropped the protection, and did so in a way that was impossible to detect on Windows machines and required a fair amount of technical work when using Linux. AMD has yet to say why TSME worked on these CPUs, or even to confirm the change. AMD declined to answer questions sent by email other than to say TSME "is a security feature only applied to PRO CPUs as part of AMD PRO Technologies." The statement is the first known time the chipmaker has explicitly made this restriction public. [...] There's no indication that AMD ever advertised or marketed TSME as being available in consumer CPUs. AMD has long said that a related memory protection, Secure Memory Encryption (SME), is available only in the Pro and Epyc CPU tiers. SME is OS-managed. It uses a single key and allows the OS to selectively encrypt individual memory pages. TSME is firmware-managed. It encrypts all RAM with no OS involvement. When active, it provides protection against physical attacks, including cold boot exploits, DRAM interface snooping, and memory module removal. It activates silently when enabled in the BIOS, making it the more practically useful of the two protections. Ben Kilpatrick, a self-described "privacy-conscious Linux hobbyist," discovered that TSME had stopped working on his consumer Ryzen processor despite remaining enabled in the BIOS. He spent months investigating, persuaded MSI engineers to test multiple CPUs, motherboards, and firmware versions, and filed a public AMD bug report that traced the change to newer AGESA firmware apparently disabling TSME on consumer chips while retaining it on Pro and EPYC models. "AMD engineers' comments, such as those mentioned above, and the years of TSME working just fine in the lower-cost tier processors, have understandably conditioned Kilpatrick and other users to reasonably regard it as an expected part of the chip package," reports Ars Technica. "AMD quietly removing it and providing no acknowledgment or explanation strikes these users as something of a betrayal." Joe Fitzgerald, an expert in silicon-level security, said in an interview: "They could have not realized they did it leading to their cagey responses, or they could have done it intentionally and tried to get away with it, leading to the same cagey responses. But I really feel like an explanation should be in order, even if it was 'TSME was never supposed to be supported. We did ship some firmwares that erroneously enabled it, but you shouldn't use them since we can't guarantee it'll work properly.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
16:00 EDT
Chipmaker Nvidia seeks to raise over $25B in first bond deal since 2021 [Ars Technica - All content]
Chipmaker Nvidia is planning to sell $25 billion of investment-grade debt in the US on Monday, its first bond sale in five years, in a test of investor appetite for further exposure to the AI sector.
In a marquee seven-part bond offering, the company will issue a wide range of maturities from two years to 30 years, according to a term sheet seen by the FT.
The issuance was upsized from $20 billion after receiving more than $85 billion in orders by early afternoon in New York, according to people familiar with the deal.
A Chinese rocket breaks apart dangerously close to the Starlink constellation [Ars Technica - All content]
The upper stage from a commercial Chinese rocket that launched last week has broken apart in space, spreading debris in a heavily trafficked part of low-Earth orbit home to the International Space Station and a significant portion of SpaceX's Starlink broadband network.
The breakup occurred shortly after the Zhuque-2E rocket reached orbit on June 9 with two satellites providing direct-to-cell communications, perhaps around the time the upper stage was expected to perform a disposal burn. The US Space Force confirmed the breakup event in a post on space-track.org, a website used by the military to distribute orbit data to the public.
"The tracked pieces are being incorporated into routine conjunction assessment to support spaceflight safety," the Space Force wrote in an advisory. "There are currently no threats to human spaceflight. Analysis is ongoing."
Fox’s $22B Roku acquisition aims to expand its reach into smart TVs, advertising [Ars Technica - All content]
Fox Corporation has agreed to buy Roku Inc. for $160 per share, an approximate enterprise value of $22 billion, the firms announced today.
The acquisition would unite Fox’s broadcast channels, including Fox, Fox News, Fox Business, and FS1, as well as its streaming businesses, including Tubi, a free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) platform that Fox bought in 2020, with Roku’s own FAST service, The Roku Channel, and Roku’s streaming hardware business, including its streaming sticks and smart TVs. Roku says it has 100 million households using its platform.
The most valuable part of Roku’s business isn't its hardware, which lost $19.1 million in the quarter ending March 31, 2026, but its the operating system (Roku OS) and advertising business. In that same quarter, Roku’s advertising and subscriptions business posted a gross profit of $584.1 million, with the advertising business pulling in $371 million in revenue. The COVID-19 pandemic helped Roku become profitable in 2021, but the company didn’t see annual profitability again until 2025.
Users cry foul after AMD stripped memory crypto from its consumer CPUs [Ars Technica - All content]
A decade ago, AMD added a protection to its high-end CPUs to protect them against cold boot attacks and other types of physical exploits that siphon sensitive data out of the connected memory chips. Short for Transparent Secure Memory Encryption, TSME encrypts the entire contents stored in memory, making the data useless to physical attackers.
Over time, AMD added TSME to lower-end processors, including the consumer version of its Ryzen chips, a CPU that costs less than the Pro version. Over the years, users of these lower-end chips have gotten used to the added security. Recently and without warning or notice, this lower-end line of AMD chips suddenly dropped the protection, and did so in a way that was impossible to detect on Windows machines and required a fair amount of technical work when using Linux.
Now you see it, now you don't
AMD has yet to say why TSME worked on these CPUs, or even to confirm the change. AMD declined to answer questions sent by email other than to say TSME "is a security feature only applied to PRO CPUs as part of AMD PRO Technologies." The statement is the first known time the chipmaker has explicitly made this restriction public.
Trump's 'Made In the USA' Phone Is Just a Reskinned HTC U24 Pro [Slashdot]
Longtime Slashdot reader necro81 writes: The heavily promoted, $499 T1 "Trump Phone" was originally said to be "Made in the USA" and ship in September 2025. Later, that was downgraded to "Assembled in the USA." Given the Trump Organization's lack of engineering or supply chain expertise, many assumed the "T1" would just be a private-label phone made by someone else. After a number of delays, the first phones are finally shipping. iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro -- a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA," that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros. iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design,' but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I'm failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I've certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time." Quinn Nelson of Snazzy Labs on YouTube also published a comprehensive video of his experience ordering, unboxing, and tearing down the phone. "From pre-order emails landing in Gmail spam thanks to botched DMARC records, to paying for the $47.45 Trump Mobile 47 Plan over the phone, the entire buying experience was a disaster worthy of its own review," writes Nelson.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
15:00 EDT
20 years of Intel Macs: Why Apple switched, and why it switched again [Ars Technica - All content]
The release of macOS 27 later this fall won't quite close the book on the Intel Mac. The last handful of models that could run macOS 26 Tahoe will be eligible for security and Safari updates for two more years, and elements of the Rosetta compatibility layer for running Intel code on Apple Silicon Macs will be with us in some form for some indeterminate amount of time after that.
But macOS 26 is definitely the last chapter of the Intel Mac story. Anything that happens after this is a coda or an epilogue.
Most of our WWDC coverage has been forward-looking, so indulge us if you will in a look backward at the full history of the Intel Mac, a partnership between two companies that made Macs dramatically better, until it started making them worse.
Good news—we have extra time before the Sun ends life on Earth [Ars Technica - All content]
It’s a bit worrying when a scientific paper begins, “How long will life on Earth survive?” But in this case—a study by Jacob Haqq‐Misra of Blue Marble Space and Eric Wolf at the University of Colorado Boulder—the billion-plus-year timeline under consideration shouldn’t cause you too much existential panic.
The context for this question is that we understand the Sun will brighten as it eventually matures into a red giant that swallows the Earth in a solar furnace. So, where along that 5 billion-year path will life on Earth, in fact, be cooked?
Weathering and the weather
This isn’t just a question of incoming radiation. Among the thermostat-like stabilizing feedback loops in Earth’s climate, the cycling of CO2 through the solid Earth is a major factor over timescales this long. The weathering of silicate rocks at the surface converts atmospheric CO2 into carbonate that ends up on the seafloor, where it can be subducted into the mantle with tectonic plates. (And eventually, it can cycle back out to the atmosphere through volcanoes.)
To boldly go where everyone has gone before [Pharyngula]
I’m about to attempt a trek from my house to the grocery store and back again, because I want to get back into the habit of regular walks. It’s going to be a little bit of a challenge — I’ve been doing short walks around the house, but I think I can handle a whole kilometer and a half, because maybe I’m getting overconfident.
If I’m not back by noon, call out the helicopters and the search parties. (I also have an ace in the hole: Morris has an informal bus service where you just call and they eventually deliver you right to your door. Don’t worry.)
I’m back, call off the emergency search teams. It took an hour and a half to walk there and back? I’m getting so slow.
A new species of spider has been identified.
We present a morphological description of a recently discovered species of spider in the family Trogloraptoridae from the Columbia River Gorge in northwestern Oregon. The family was previously monotypic (Trogloraptor marchingtoni) and only known from populations near the southwestern Oregon—northern California border. Trogloraptor tulishpun sp. nov. retains the key family synapomorphy, distinctive subsegmented raptorial tarsi, and an oblique membranous division of the basal segment of the anterior lateral spinnerets. Trogloraptor tulishpun is distinguished from T. marchingtoni by its color pattern, clypeal height, vulvar and palp structure. We have found T. tulishpun in four localities in the Columbia River Gorge, which show little mitochondrial sequence divergence from one another, but are highly genetically distinct from T. marchingtoni. Trogloraptor tulishpun is found in basalt features, including lava tubes and shallow talus caves, and has been observed to eat arachnids and moths, making them top predators in these environments.
First, that’s a truly awesome name, Trogloraptor, for a cave spider. Somebody hit a home run with that name.
Naming a new species isn’t a trivial thing, but the lab that found this one went above and beyond to come up with the name Trogloraptor tulishpun. They consulted the local people of the Yakama nation, and got the name “tulishpun” from them. And then they had a formal naming ceremony, as reported on NPR.
ANTHONY WASHINES: At this time, we’ll open this ground, the sacred ground that we’re standing on, and then we’ll begin.
PRICHEP: Naming ceremonies are usually, unsurprisingly, for people. It’s a formal introduction of the name, but it’s also a way to sort of welcome that individual and mark their place in the community.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WASHINES: You’re being a witness to this brother being acknowledged.
PRICHEP: Anthony Washines is the Yakima elder who came up with the spider’s name.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WASHINES: And so, from this day forward, we will call them by the name tulishpun. Repeat after me – tulishpun.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: Tulishpun.
PRICHEP: Gifts and food were shared, and a traditional naming song was sung. A few spiders were gathered to receive their name and then returned back to the nearby caves. Washines knows people will see tulishpun as a small thing. But he says every creature has its place, and this little spider has been in this place even when his people were not.
WASHINES: We were literally herded to a reservation up in the high-desert plateau, which was not our land. But he stayed here and remained. He still took care of this land.
PRICHEP: Usually, the discovery of a new species is celebrated with a pizza party in the lab, maybe a nod from the dean. It’s an academic milestone. But for tulishpun, it’s a community event, a gathering of scientists and citizens, of human and animal, to name all of those who make up this land and honor the connections between them.
How lovely. I’ll keep that in mind if I ever discover a novel species, which is extremely unlikely. In my background, we didn’t go looking for new species — new mutations and new molecules, sure, and we had ceremonies, usually involving popping a champagne bottle, when a paper was published, but we lack a connection to the community, the people, and the land. A species, though, is something people may have interacted with before, and that interacts with other levels of its biome, and it is appropriate to add a scientific context to a known part of our world.
Sonos, eight years after the IPO [Philip Greenspun’s Weblog]
Readers are likely aware of my fondness for whole-house audio and, since 2005, Sonos, a company that has roots in Santa Barbara, CA and Boston, MA. The company went public at $15 per share almost exactly eight years ago. How’s the stock done? If you don’t adjust for inflation, it’s right at its original IPO price (down from the first-day bump, though). Adjusted at official CPI, though, someone who got IPO shares is down 25 percent. Adjusted for South Florida real estate costs, the investor is down about 50 percent.
Given that state governors ordered peasants to stay home for 2-3 years in a lot of high-income states, how do we account for a home audio company having done this badly? Sony has doubled, in nominal dollars, over the same period. Consumers don’t care about multi-room audio because they always have their AirPods in and the sound thus follows them?
Did Sonos fail to jump on the social justice bandwagon or ignore Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money? Certainly not!
In celebration of global Pride the Internet radio service introduced a limited-edition station, initiated by a group of LGBTQ+ employees.
Dmitri Siegel, VP Global Brand, extended his support becoming Pride@’s official executive sponsor. “I am so grateful to have the opportunity to be an ally in the Pride@ group,” he said. “As a straight white male, it’s common to feel intimidated or uncomfortable engaging on LGBTQ+ issues because you feel like you are going to say the wrong thing or be offensive in some way. Being a part of Pride@ has given me the opportunity to do my work—listen and learn. Getting over insecurity and discomfort unlocks all these amazing people and a whole aspect of the human experience that I would otherwise miss out on.”
The article references a corporate tweet:
The station was still up and running a year ago:
How about this month? The radio web site features state-sponsored NPR and Democratic Party-affiliated MSNBC, but I didn’t see anything about Pride.
Sonos Radio has an Instagram account. No Pride station is mentioned. (The “Full Spectrum; Celebrate Child” station is still available in the app, however.)
Sonos has an X account(!), but hasn’t posted anything for Pride 2026. Nor did they post anything regarding Pride on their (rather thin) Facebook account. Their careers page assures today’s young people that working life can be a continuous Pride celebration:
It looks as though the company has abandoned its commitment to proselytizing for Rainbow Flagism to consumers, reminding consumers that Black history is more important than other kinds of history, etc. In other words, Sonos has abandoned its principles and still can’t make money, the worst of all possible worlds for a corporation.
I still love the product, even if their lightweight powered speakers can’t overcome the laws of physics (see below regarding the latest Sonos S2 gear versus their old amps driving heavier passive (ancient) speakers). They also have great support compared to most companies. I’m wondering what they could make that would be profitable in an Apple-takes-all world.
Related:
The post Sonos, eight years after the IPO appeared first on Philip Greenspun’s Weblog.
Britain Unveils Sweeping Ban On Social Media For Under-16s [Slashdot]
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from NBC News: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced a sweeping ban on social media use for those under 16, joining other countries around the world seeking to protect children online. "It's a big step for our country," Starmer said in a recorded video message released Monday. "Social media is making our children unhappy and unsafe, and as a parent, as much as a Prime Minister, I just can't let that go on anymore," he added. The ban will include social platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X, while there is no intention for messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal to be included, the government said in a release. [...] Starmer's government called Monday's announcement a "landmark" move, saying the new measures would be brought to Parliament before Christmas, with protections expected to come into force next spring. Beyond the blanket social media ban, the restrictions will also include blocks on functions such as livestreaming and stranger communication with children for under-16s, it added. "It's not an easy thing to do. I'll be honest about that," Starmer said. "We haven't rushed into it. We've looked carefully at the evidence, and we'll have to adapt our approach as technology changes, learn from other countries which are taking similar steps." He went on to say that it will face resistance from some of the most powerful companies in the world. "But we will take them on, and we will win, because the need for action could not be any clearer."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Diversity report 2026 [W3C - News]
W3C released today the 2026 diversity report. As part of our commitment and continued focus on diversity and inclusion, since 2018 we annually report on gender and geographic diversity of W3C's governing bodies.
We would like to be a model of supporting diversity. As an international organization, we can see the immense value we gain from having greater gender diversity, and expertise from across multiple countries and cultures. The diversity of the whole world needs to be reflected, as over 70% of the world is now online and more people continue to access and use the web we develop standards for, here together at the Web Consortium.
We believe that more diversity means better representation, which leads to better and more inclusive design. Indeed, more background, more use cases, more edge cases, lead to a better web. More diversity also brings higher quality results.
This year again, we want to financially help cover TPAC 2026 meeting travel costs for W3C participants from groups under-represented in the web community, who without financial support would not be able to attend TPAC in person.
We seek contributors —big and small— who like us would like to see reflected in web standards and web design the diversity of background, gender, experiences, expertise and skills.
14:00 EDT
Fox Is Buying Roku For $22 Billion [Slashdot]
Fox is buying Roku for $22 billion, combining Fox's sports, news, entertainment, Tubi, and Fox One offerings with a streaming platform that reaches about 100 million people. The companies say the merger would create the "third-largest player in US television by share of viewing," while Fox insists Roku will remain open to competing apps after the deal closes. CNN reports: Fox has dabbled in streaming over the past few years -- finally launching its Fox One competitor last August -- but has lacked a serious streaming business with the ability to compete in a space dominated by YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, HBO Max, Paramount+ and Peacock. With CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery receiving initial US regulatory approval to combine with Paramount, Fox's purchase of Roku became more urgent. [...] The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027 with the companies forecasting $400 million in savings. "This is a defining moment for Fox, and a natural extension of the deliberate and focused strategy we have been executing for nearly a decade," said Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch. "Today, we take the next step: bringing together the most valuable live content portfolio in video consumption with the preeminent streaming platform through which America watches it." Murdoch said Roku will continue to offer competing apps. "It's essential that Roku remain open and partner-friendly business. We don't see that changing at all."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
13:00 EDT
F1 in Spain: An old-fashioned strategy fight can still be thrilling [Ars Technica - All content]
Formula 1 raced in Spain this past weekend. The Barcelona-Catalunya circuit is one of F1's purpose-built race tracks, with a number of fast corners and a track surface that's more abrasive than usual. That means downforce is the name of the game. Catalunya has always required good aerodynamics, but it's doubly important now. The more speed you can carry through a corner, the less energy you have to add on the following straight, and energy management is now as important in F1 as it is at Le Mans or in Formula E or even IndyCar. And the more downforce you have, the less the car slides, and the less the car slides, the less the tires get eaten up.
It's the tire wear that suggested the strategies. So far, all the races this season have been one-stop affairs as drivers make their required change from one tire compound to another. But 66 laps of Catalunya would require at least three sets of Pirelli tires to get to the end. Maybe even four. As the tires wear, they become slower, to the tune of 0.2–0.3 seconds per lap. And one way to exploit that is with an "undercut"—pit early, change onto fresh rubber, and make use of the tire offset against your rivals to put in fast laps while they're losing time. Do it right, and when they make their next pit stop, you should be in front.
Splitting the race into four stints means one more pit stop, and it costs about 22 seconds to drive through the pit lane, stop in the box, and then exit the pit lane again, assuming a tire change in less than three seconds. But since each set of tires is needed for fewer laps, they can be worked hard enough to offset that 22-second pit stop and more.
Soccer Edition: Watch World Cup highlights from across the NPR Network [NPR Topics: News]
The 2026 World Cup is playing out in communities across the country. Journalists from NPR and its member stations are in your city — capturing the excitement and asking the important questions.
