Judge the product by how it looks, not by how it was made

The US Space Force announced Friday it selected SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Blue Origin for $13.7 billion in contracts to deliver the Pentagon's most critical military to orbit into the early 2030s.

These missions will launch the government's heaviest national security satellites, like the National Reconnaissance Office's large bus-sized spy platforms, and deploy them into bespoke orbits. These types of launches often demand heavy-lift rockets with long-duration upper stages that can cruise through space for six or more hours.

The contracts awarded Friday are part of the next phase of the military's space launch program once dominated by United Launch Alliance, the 50-50 joint venture between legacy defense contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

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ChatGPT has seen India as its largest market by monthly active users and the second largest by downloads, per the external data seen by TechCrunch.

Earlier this week, when it seemed as though TikTok’s fate in the US would actually be decided by April 5th, everyone — from Amazon to the founder of OnlyFans — was coming out of the woodwork to buy it.

As it turns out, none of them had a chance. And now, thanks to President Donald Trump’s tariff war, no one may get to buy TikTok. 

People familiar with the matter tell me that, despite all of the bids for the app, the White House was only seriously considering an Oracle-led consortium, which included many of ByteDance’s biggest investors who were set to roll their stakes into a new, US entity. 

The proposal, which would have licensed the app’s algorithm from China and shuffled some shareholder money around to make TikTok look more independent from ByteDance, was set to be announced before President Trump went nuclear on tariffs. As others have reported and I’ve independently confirmed, his tariff announcement on Wednesday torched any immediate chance of the TikTok proposal being blessed by the Chinese government. 

On Friday, less than an hour after Trump said he was pushing back the clock on banning TikTok by another 75 days to finish working out a deal, ByteDance …

Read the full story at The Verge.

If you’ve been experiencing issues when trying to access some of Apple’s online services, it’s not just you. The App Store and other Apple services are facing an outage and are currently down for some users.

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Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has infiltrated the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an agency that has a say over resources Musk needs or could benefit from for some of his private sector business, The Verge has learned. 

Three people who have been identified as DOGE staffers are listed in a public directory called “Finding People at the FCC.” Tarak Makecha, Jordan Wick, and Jacob Altik are all listed in the FCC directory, with email addresses associated with the agency. Each is listed under the office “OCH,” which in other agency documents refers to the Office of the Chairman.

Makecha is a finance executive who, according to LinkedIn, has most recently worked in a drone detection software company and previously worked at Tesla. Makecha has reportedly been involved through DOGE at OPM and the State Department. Wick is a former Waymo engineer who’s reportedly been given access to systems at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Altik is a lawyer who’s reportedly been involved at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). 

DOGE has recently expanded into other enforcement agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission, as The Verge reported earlier on Friday. The FCC’s authority over radio, TV, broadband, and satellite intersects with Musk’s businesses, like granting certain permissions for SpaceX’s Starlink operations. Its role as a regulator and enforcer also means it stores information on SpaceX and its competitors in order to make decisions. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has previously said that Musk would recuse himself from potential conflicts. The FCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment about what the DOGE staffers’ role will be at the agency or what restrictions there will be on their data access.

Training the top models in the world is very expensive and can duplicate previous work, said Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of artificial intelligence at Microsoft.

Meta and Pinterest have agreed to donate to a charity set up in the name of schoolgirl Molly Russell.

There's a lot of excitement about the new console - but also concern about the high price of its games.

Journalist Ben Black was "shocked" to discover his fake news from five years ago used by AI.

The car maker's sales slide has been attributed to competition and controversy around its boss.

The president has granted the app a second 75-day extension to comply with a law that requires it to either sell its US assets or face a ban.

More than a million people watched online as details of the long awaited successor to the hit console were announced.

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff returned to Amazon this week, coming back to the company just about two years after he left, Bloomberg reports. He’s now a vice president at the company, and he will be heading up the Ring, Blink, Amazon Key, and Sidewalk teams. 

Siminoff is replacing Liz Hamren, who had taken over following Siminoff’s initial departure. Hamren and the team “have done an awesome job driving the business, delivering strong results, and bringing a lot of delightful experiences to neighbors,” Siminoff says in an Amazon Q&A. He adds that the “AI transformation happening right now” is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity.”

In the Q&A, Siminoff also says that he and Panos Panay, Amazon’s SVP of devices and services, have talked “a lot” about “experiences we can create with devices that are awesome on their own, but even better together. I think you’ll continue to see a lot of that from us moving forward – helping customers stay safe, connected, and informed as part of a magical connected experience.”

The day after Siminoff originally left Amazon, Siminoff sold a new company, Honest Day’s Work, to Latch, which he helped rebrand to Door.com. The company announced late last year that he would be moving into an advisory role in 2025.

Plus: discover the latest at Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, Pop Mart's takeover, John Wick at AREA15, and more in this week's theme park news.

After a race-free weekend, we explain how to watch the F1 Japanese Grand Prix for free online.

Nice economy you have there, said President Donald Trump’s administration. It would be a shame if something happened to it.

The something, announced earlier this week, is a set of globally applied tariffs that make no sense on their face. No sane economist would endorse this. Through a combination of stupidity, incompetence and sheer gangsterism, the Trump administration has decided to levy a series of taxes that encourage blatant corruption, entirely fail to encourage American manufacturing growth, and leave people and companies poorer. That is, assuming that the taxes come into play at all.

“This is the craziest of the crazy things we’ve seen thus far.”

The central, persistent thing Trump seems to misunderstand about tariffs is that they are paid in the US by people in the US. A reasonable person might also remember that he tried them a few years ago in a trade war, to negative effect. We have, as a nation, shot ourselves in the dick. But don’t take my word for it! Here are some actual experts:

• “This is the craziest of the crazy things we’ve seen thus far,” says Chris Barrett, professor of economics at Cornell University’s SC Johnson School of Business.
…

Read the full story at The Verge.

Welcome to episode 48 of Pixelated, a podcast by 9to5Google. This week, we talk about the Pixel 10 Pro Fold renders and Pixel 10 camera rumors.

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President Trump announced this week a series of tariffs imposed on the import of products from other countries, which will end up hitting many US companies like Apple – since most of its products come from China. Now it seems that Apple is considering expanding the assembly of iPhones in Brazil to get around the US tariffs.

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AI image generator Midjourney released its first new model in quite some time today; dubbed V7, it's a ground-up rework that is available in alpha to users now.

There are two areas of improvement in V7: the first is better images, and the second is new tools and workflows.

Starting with the image improvements, V7 promises much higher coherence and consistency for hands, fingers, body parts, and "objects of all kinds." It also offers much more detailed and realistic textures and materials, like skin wrinkles or the subtleties of a ceramic pot.

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