Month: November 2025

Trump revives unpopular Ted Cruz plan to punish states that impose AI laws

Cruz plan to block broadband funding lost 99-1, but now it’s back—in Trump form.

President Trump is considering an executive order that would require the federal government to file lawsuits against states with AI laws, and prevent states with AI laws from obtaining broadband funding.

The draft order, “Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National AI Policy,” would order the attorney general to “establish an AI Litigation Task Force whose sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws, including on grounds that such laws unconstitutionally regulate interstate commerce, are preempted by existing Federal regulations, or are otherwise unlawful in the Attorney General’s judgment.”

The draft order says the Trump administration “will act to ensure that there is a minimally burdensome national standard—not 50 discordant State ones.” It specifically names laws enacted by California and Colorado and directs the Secretary of Commerce to evaluate whether other laws should be challenged.

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Bundesverwaltungsgericht: Bundesnetzagentur muss 5G-Frequenzvergabe wiederholen

Das Bundesverwaltungsgericht hat die Beschwerden der Bundesnetzagentur abgewiesen. Die Frequenzvergabe war ungültig, MVNOs wurden von CSU-Minister Scheuer benachteiligt. (Bundesnetzagentur, Freenet)

Das Bundesverwaltungsgericht hat die Beschwerden der Bundesnetzagentur abgewiesen. Die Frequenzvergabe war ungültig, MVNOs wurden von CSU-Minister Scheuer benachteiligt. (Bundesnetzagentur, Freenet)

Blue Origin revealed some massively cool plans for its New Glenn rocket

“The iterative design from our current 7×2 vehicle means we can build this rocket quickly.”

One week after the successful second launch of its large New Glenn booster, Blue Origin revealed a roadmap on Thursday for upgrades to the rocket, including a new variant with more main engines and a super-heavy lift capability.

These upgrades to the rocket are “designed to increase payload performance and launch cadence, while enhancing reliability,” the company said in an update published on its website. The enhancements will be phased in over time, starting with the third launch of New Glenn, which is likely to occur during the first half of 2026.

A bigger beast

The most significant part of the update concerned an evolution of New Glenn that will transform the booster into a super-heavy lift launch vehicle. The first stage of this evolved vehicle will have nine BE-4 engines instead of seven, and the upper stage four BE-4 engines instead of two. In its update, Blue Origin refers to the new vehicle as 9×4 and the current variant as 7×2, a reference to the number of engines in each stage.

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Google’s latest swing at Chromebook gaming is a free year of GeForce Now

GeForce Now Fast Pass is a new service tier exclusively for Chromebooks.

Earlier this year, Google announced the end of its efforts to get Steam running on Chromebooks, but it’s not done trying to make these low-power laptops into gaming machines. Google has teamed up with Nvidia to offer a version of GeForce Now cloud streaming that is perplexingly limited in some ways and generous in others. Starting today, anyone who buys a Chromebook will get a free year of a new service called GeForce Now Fast Pass. There are no ads and less waiting for server slots, but you don’t get to play very long.

Back before Google killed its Stadia game streaming service, it would often throw in a few months of the Pro subscription with Chromebook purchases. In the absence of its own gaming platform, Google has turned to Nvidia to level up Chromebook gaming. GeForce Now (GFN), which has been around in one form or another for more than a decade, allows you to render games on a remote server and stream the video output to the device of your choice. It works on computers, phones, TVs, and yes, Chromebooks.

The new Chromebook feature is not the same GeForce Now subscription you can get from Nvidia. Fast Pass, which is exclusive to Chromebooks, includes a mishmash of limits and bonuses that make it a pretty strange offering. Fast Pass is based on the free tier of GeForce Now, but users will get priority access to server slots. So no queuing for five or 10 minutes to start playing. It also lacks the ads that Nvidia’s standard free tier includes. Fast Pass also uses the more powerful RTX servers, which are otherwise limited to the $10-per-month ($100 yearly) Performance tier.

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Flying with whales: Drones are remaking marine mammal research

Aerial drones are giving scientists a new view of life at sea.

In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, causing one of the largest marine oil spills ever. In the aftermath of the disaster, whale scientist Iain Kerr traveled to the area to study how the spill had affected sperm whales, aiming specialized darts at the animals to collect pencil eraser-sized tissue samples.

It wasn’t going well. Each time his boat approached a whale surfacing for air, the animal vanished beneath the waves before he could reach it. “I felt like I was playing Whac-A-Mole,” he says.

As darkness fell, a whale dove in front of Kerr and covered him in whale snot. That unpleasant experience gave Kerr, who works at the conservation group Ocean Alliance, an idea: What if he could collect that same snot by somehow flying over the whale? Researchers can glean much information from whale snot, including the animal’s DNA sequence, its sex, whether it is pregnant, and the makeup of its microbiome.

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“Hey Google, did you upgrade your AI in my Android Auto?”

Conversational AI from your phone cast to your car should be about to get better.

Google’s platform for casting audio and navigation apps from a smartphone to a car’s infotainment system beat Apple’s to market by a good while, but that headstart has not always kept Android Auto in the lead ahead of CarPlay. But an upgrade rolls out today—provided you already have Gemini on your phone, now it can interact with you while you drive.

What has sometimes felt like a hands-off approach by Google toward Android Auto didn’t reflect an indifference to making inroads into the automotive world. Apple might have its flashy CarPlay Ultra that lets Cupertino take over the look and feel of a car’s digital UI, but outside of an Aston Martin, where will any of us encounter that?

Meanwhile the confusingly similarly named Android Automotive OS—a version of Android developed to run with the kind of stability required in a vehicle as opposed to a handheld—has made solid inroads with automakers, and you’ll find AAOS running in dozens of makes from OEMs like General Motors, Volkswagen Group, Stellantis, Geely, and more, although not always with the Google Automotive Services—Google Maps, Google Play, and Google Assistant—that impressed us back in 2021 when we drove the original Polestar 2.

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