Since Google released its Veo 3 AI model last week, social media users have been having fun with its ability to quickly generate highly realistic eight-second clips complete with sound and lip-synced dialogue. TikTok's algorithm has been serving me plenty of Veo-generated videos featuring impossible challenges, fake news reports, and even surreal short narrative films, to name just a few popular archetypes.

However, among all the AI-generated video experiments spreading around, I've also noticed a surprising counter-trend on my TikTok feed. Amid all the videos of Veo-generated avatars pretending to be real people, there are now also a bunch of videos of real people pretending to be Veo-generated avatars.

“This has to be real. There’s no way it's AI.”

I stumbled on this trend when the TikTok algorithm fed me this video topped with the extra-large caption "Google VEO 3 THIS IS 100% AI." As I watched and listened to the purported AI-generated band that appeared to be playing in the crowded corner of someone's living room, I read the caption containing the supposed prompt that had generated the clip: "a band of brothers with beards playing rock music in 6/8 with an accordion."

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From its humble beginnings in the late 20th century, Google has come to dominate online searches, putting it squarely in the US government's antitrust crosshairs. The ongoing search antitrust case threatens to upend Google's dominance, giving smaller players a chance to thrive and possibly wiping others out. After wrapping up testimony in the case earlier this month, lawyers for Google and the Department of Justice have now made their closing arguments.

The DOJ won the initial trial, securing a ruling that Google used anticompetitive practices to maintain its monopoly in general search. During the time this case has taken to meander its way through the legal system, the online landscape has been radically altered, making it harder than ever to envision a post-Google Internet.

To address Google's monopoly, the DOJ is asking United States District Judge Amit Mehta to impose limits on Google's business dealings and order a divestment of the Chrome browser. Forcing the sale of Chrome would be a major penalty and a coup for the DOJ lawyers, but this issue has been overshadowed somewhat as the case drags on. During closing arguments, the two sides dueled over how Google's search deals and the rise of AI could change the Internet as we know it.

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

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

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

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday updated its immunization schedules for children and adults to partially reflect the abrupt changes announced by health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this week.

In a 58-second video posted on social media on Tuesday, May 27, Kennedy said he was unilaterally revoking the CDC's recommendations that healthy children and pregnant people get COVID-19 vaccines.

"I couldn’t be more pleased to announce that, as of today, the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule," Kennedy said in the video.

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Twenty-eight-year-old Nathan Laatsch was, until yesterday, a cybersecurity employee at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). He had a Top Secret clearance and worked in the Insider Threat Division. Laatsch spent his days—you'll understand the past tense in a moment—"enabling user monitoring on individuals with access to DIA systems," including employees under surreptitious internal investigation.

Given that Laatsch was one of those who "watched the watchers," he appears to have had supreme confidence in his own ability to avoid detection should he decide to go rogue. "Stupid mistakes" made by other idiots would "not be difficult for me to avoid," he once wrote. DIA couldn't even launch an investigation of Laatsch without him knowing that something was up.

The Greeks had a word for this: hubris.

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has failed to reverse a preliminary injunction currently blocking him from probing Media Matters for America (MMFA) in defense of Elon Musk's social media platform X.

On Friday, a US appeals court upheld the injunction. In his opinion, senior Circuit Judge Harry T. Edwards wrote that there was "ample" evidence that Paxton "pursued a retaliatory campaign" against MMFA "because they published an unfavorable article about X.com." And MMFA has standing to raise a First Amendment defense, because "the First Amendment generally 'prohibits government officials from subjecting individuals to retaliatory actions after the fact for having engaged in protected speech," Edwards wrote.

Edwards noted that the day after X sued MMFA over reporting on antisemitic posts appearing next to big brands' ads on X—alleging the report fraudulently spawned an ad boycott—Paxton announced a broad probe into MMFA that, he confirmed in a press release, was directly due to X's lawsuit.

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Hugging Face is best known as a platform for machine learning and AI development, but it has also been dabbling in the world of robotics. This week, the company revealed two new robots it plans to bring to market—including a humanoid one that it would sell for around $3,000, far less than many of the other options that have been floated, like Unitree's $16,000 G1.

Dubbed the HopeJR, Hugging Face's robot has up to 66 actuated degrees of freedom. According to Hugging Face Principal Research Scientist Remi Cadene, it can walk and manipulate objects. As shown in a short X video, it has an accessible look that reminds us a bit of Bender from Futurama. (It's the eyes.)

Co-designed with French robotics company The Robot Studio, HopeJR will be open source. "The important aspect is that these robots are open source, so anyone can assemble, rebuild, [and] understand how they work, and [they’re] affordable, so that robotics doesn’t get dominated by just a few big players with dangerous black-box systems," Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue told TechCrunch.

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The online incel ("involuntary celibate") subculture is mostly known for its extreme rhetoric, primarily against women, sometimes erupting into violence. But a growing number of self-identified incels are using their ideology as an excuse for not working or studying. This could constitute a kind of coping mechanism to make sense of their failures—not just in romantic relationships but also in education and employment, according to a paper published in the journal Gender, Work, & Organization.

Contrary to how it's often portrayed, the "manosphere," as it is often called, is not a monolith. Those who embrace the "Redpill" ideology, for example, might insist that women control the "sexual marketplace" and are only interested in ultramasculine "Chads." They champion self-improvement as a means to make themselves more masculine and successful, and hence (they believe) more attractive to women—or at least better able to manipulate women.

By contrast, the "Blackpilled" incel contingent is generally more nihilistic. These individuals reject the Redpill notion of alpha-male masculinity and the accompanying focus on self-improvement. They believe that dating and social success are entirely determined by one's looks and/or genetics. Since there is nothing they can do to improve their chances with women or their lot in life, why even bother?

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Europa and Enceladus are two ocean moons that scientists have concluded have liquid water oceans underneath their outer icy shells. The Europa Clipper mission should reach Europa around April of 2030. If it collects data hinting at the moon’s potential habitability, robotic lander missions could be the only way to confirm if there’s really life in there or not.

To make these lander missions happen, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory team has been working on a robot that could handle the search for life and already tested it on the Matanuska Glacier in Alaska. “At this point this is a pretty mature concept,” says Kevin Hand, a planetary scientist at JPL who led this effort.

Into the unknown

There are only a few things we know for sure about conditions on the surface of Europa, and nearly all of them don’t bode well for lander missions. First, Europa is exposed to very harsh radiation, which is a problem for electronics. The window of visibility—when a potential robotic lander could contact Earth—lasts less than half of the 85 hours it takes for the moon to complete its day-night cycle due to the Europa-Jupiter orbit. So, for more than half the mission, the robot would need to fend for itself, with no human ground teams to get it out of trouble. The lander would also need to run on non-rechargeable batteries, because the vast distance to the Sun would make solar panels prohibitively massive.

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Broadband lobby groups asked the Trump administration to block state laws that require Internet service providers to offer cheap plans to people with low incomes. The biggest lobby groups for the cable, telecom, and mobile industries made the request in a filing with the US Department of Justice this week.

The groups want Trump's Justice Department to sue states such as New York, which requires ISPs to offer broadband for $15 or $20 a month to people who meet income eligibility requirements. "The Antitrust Division should work with other components of the Department of Justice to consider bringing affirmative preemption litigation against the harmful state laws already on the books or soon enacted—particularly those that directly regulate broadband rates," the lobby groups said.

The lobby groups also said the Justice Department should collaborate with the Federal Communications Commission "to thoroughly examine every possible tool in the federal government's toolbox, including any and all ways in which the Commission can take regulatory action to preempt harmful state regulations." The filing was submitted by CTIA-The Wireless Association, NCTA-The Internet & Television Association, and USTelecom-The Broadband Association.

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Using Google products in 2025 means using (or avoiding) AI features, which are becoming a core part of the experience across the board. Last year, Gmail gained the ability to summarize emails on demand. Now, Google says AI summaries will be generated and displayed automatically in the Gmail app for Android and iOS.

Before this latest change, you had to tap the "Summarize this email" chip at the top of the screen to generate an AI summary of the message contents. Google has decided to make this automatic for emails "where a summary is helpful." That means messages that are longer or threads that contain multiple replies. The announcement is a bit vague about how much detail will trigger a summary, but it probably won't take much, as Google wants people interacting with AI features as much as possible.

Gmail's AI summaries use Gemini to generate a brief list of bullet points that break down the content of the thread. It appears at the top of the app, which may not be ideal. In the same way that AI Overviews appear at the top of search results and push the actual search results farther out of reach, Gmail's AI summaries take up valuable real estate at the top of the screen.

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On Thursday, a Google Maps glitch accidentally made it appear that the most desirable routes on German autobahns and highways were shut down, The Guardian reported.

It remains unclear what exactly unleashed a flood of stop signs on Google Maps in the area just ahead of a four-day holiday break when many drivers had travel plans. Maps of roadways in Belgium and the Netherlands were also affected.

If drivers had stopped to check alternative apps, they would have learned that traffic was flowing normally and may have avoided clogging traffic on alternative routes or wasting time speculating about what could have happened to close so many major roads. Apple Maps and Waze accurately charted traffic patterns, and only Google Maps appeared to be affected.

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Once hailed as a triumph of public health, water fluoridation is now under intense attack in the US.

Despite decades of data proving its efficacy at protecting teeth from decay—particularly children's teeth—two states have now banned the use of fluoride in public water, and communities around the country have followed suit or are considering doing the same. The current US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is known for his anti-vaccine advocacy and for peddling conspiracy theories, has pledged to remove fluoride from US water.

Now, a pair of researchers at Harvard—Sung Eun Choi and Lisa Simon—have modeled exactly what will happen in the US if Kennedy follows through on his pledge: The number of cavities and decayed teeth in American children and teens (ages 0–19) will increase by an estimated 7.5 percentage points over the first five years. That means there will be 25.4 million more rotten teeth in the mouths of children and teenagers. The dental bills for the added decay will total at least $9.8 billion in that time. Other costs, such as loss of work among parents, were not included, making the financial estimate conservative. But children will also be more miserable, with an estimated loss of 2.9 million quality-adjusted life years.

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AUSTIN, Texas—By just my third lap in the top-spec 2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1, I glanced down at the speedometer toward the end of the Circuit of the Americas' long back straight and spied 181 mph (291 km/h) displayed for a split second. Not bad for Chevy’s newest flagship sports car, especially given that the $174,995 ZR1’s twin-turbocharged V8 pumps all 1,064 horsepower to the rear wheels only.

The US’s only purpose-built F1 track made for an excellent setting to taste Corvette’s latest; the ZR1 also commanded your attention while conquering the steep uphill toward the first corner, then winding through a series of challenging corners with plenty of elevation change. Luckily, the car itself is an engineering marvel, and Chevy brought along a team of engineers to explain exactly how the total package comes together to enable such a breathtaking pace, as well as how Chevy can responsibly sell such a powerful car to the general public at all.

The entire point of switching the Corvette’s eighth generation to a mid-engine layout was to improve weight distribution and allow the Corvette to compete against much more exotic competition from European OEMs like Ferrari. The front-engined car's engine bay also lacked the width to add a pair of turbos, due to the suspension and tire orientation, which dictated the use of a supercharger that kept peak power to “just” 755 hp (563 kW) in the last Corvette to wear the ZR1 badge.

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Elon Musk’s four-month blitz through the US government briefly made him Washington’s most powerful businessman since the Gilded Age. But it has done little for his reputation or that of his companies.

Musk this week formally abandoned his role as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), which has failed to find even a fraction of the $2 trillion in savings he originally pledged.

On Thursday, Donald Trump lamented his departure but said Musk “will always be with us, helping all the way.”

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Eighteen months after leaving his job as a vice president at Amazon to take over as Blue Origin's chief executive, Dave Limp has some thoughts on how commercial companies and government agencies like NASA should explore the Solar System together.

Limp had no background in the space industry before taking the helm of Jeff Bezos' space company in December 2023. He started his career as a computer scientist at Apple, took a stint at a venture capital firm, and joined Amazon in 2010, where he managed development of consumer devices like Alexa, Kindle, and the Fire TV.

"I had no thoughts of ever running a space company," Limp said Thursday at a space conference in Washington, DC. "I've done consumer electronics my whole life. Started at Apple and did a bunch of other things, and so when I decided to retire from Amazon, I was looking for something that I could give back a little bit, be a little bit more philanthropic in the sort of second half of my career. I didn't want to stop working, just wanted to do something different. And about that same time, Jeff was looking for a CEO."

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Welcome to Edition 7.46 of the Rocket Report! As I write this, the date is May 29. From a meteorological standpoint, "spring" ends in fewer than three days. Summer lasts from June 1 through August 31. Consider this a public service announcement for launch companies targeting "spring" and "summer" launches for various missions.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Xodiac rocket makes its final flight. Originally built by Masten Space Systems, the suborbital Xodiac rocket had flown 175 successful missions before a flight from Mojave, California, on Wednesday. But now, it will fly no more. "While the vehicle remained within its planned flight envelope, it detected an anomalous condition and commanded a flight termination," said Astrobotic, which acquired Masten a couple of years ago. "This resulted in a rapid descent and caused a loss of the vehicle upon impact with its launch pad."

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With streaming providers frequently raising prices, subscribers often feel like they’re paying more for the same service—or a lesser version, depending on what’s available to watch that month. In a unique move, Disney is introducing a small, potential financial benefit to Disney+ and Hulu subscribers in the form of some third-party discounts, freebies, trials, and contests.

As of today, Disney+ subscribers can log into Disney’s Disney+ Perks website with their streaming credentials to get access to a revolving selection of discounts and freebies. When I logged in today, I was met with options for several free trials, including a six-month one to DoorDash’s premium subscription offering, a three-month trial to Clear+, and a two-month trial to Duolingo’s premium subscription.

Disney+ subscribers can also get discounts, including to Adidas’ online marketplaces and “select” Disney Resorts Collection hotels (if you stay at least two nights, with most availability occurring between June 29 and July 31). There are also some free virtual rewards for Disney-owned games and the ability to enter sweepstakes, like for going to the premiere of the movie Freakier Friday.

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Google's rapid adoption of AI has seen the Gemini "sparkle" icon become an omnipresent element in almost every Google product. It's there to summarize your email, add items to your calendar, and more—if you trust it to do those things. Gemini is also integrated with Google Drive, where it's gaining a new feature that could make it genuinely useful: Google's AI bot will soon be able to watch videos stored in your Drive so you don't have to.

Gemini is already accessible in Drive, with the ability to summarize documents or folders, gather and analyze data, and expand on the topics covered in your documents. Google says the next step is plugging videos into Gemini, saving you from wasting time scrubbing through a file just to find something of interest.

Using a chatbot to analyze and manipulate text doesn't always make sense—after all, it's not hard to skim an email or short document. It can take longer to interact with a chatbot, which might not add any useful insights. Video is different because watching is a linear process in which you are presented with information at the pace the video creator sets. You can change playback speed or rewind to catch something you missed, but that's more arduous than reading something at your own pace. So Gemini's video support in Drive could save you real time.

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An accused movie pirate who stole more than 1,000 Blu-ray discs and DVDs while working for a DVD manufacturing company struck a plea deal this week to lower his sentence after the FBI claimed the man's piracy cost movie studios millions.

Steven Hale no longer works for the DVD company. He was arrested in March, accused of "bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying" and ripping pre-release copies of movies he could only access because his former employer was used by major movie studios. As alleged by the feds, his game was beating studios to releases to achieve the greatest possible financial gains from online leaks.

Among the popular movies that Hale is believed to have leaked between 2021 and 2022 was Spider-Man: No Way Home, which the FBI alleged was copied "tens of millions of times" at an estimated loss of "tens of millions of dollars" for just one studio on one movie. Other movies Hale ripped included animated hits like Encanto and Sing 2, as well as anticipated sequels like The Matrix: Resurrections and Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

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