The first company to complete a fully successful lunar landing is going public

Some of Firefly’s programs are going quite well. Others, not so much.

Firefly Aerospace seeks to raise more than $600 million through a public stock offering, an arrangement that would boost the company's market valuation to near $5.5 billion, according to a document filed with the SEC on Monday.

The launch of Firefly's Initial Public Offering (IPO) comes as the company works to build on a historic success in March, when Firefly's Blue Ghost lander touched down on the surface of the Moon. Firefly plans to sell 16.2 million shares of common stock, at a price of between $35 and $39 per share. Under those terms, Firefly could raise up to $631.8 million on the public market.

Firefly has applied to list its common stock on the Nasdaq Global Market under the ticker symbol "FLY."

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Review: Fantastic Four: First Steps is the best film version so far

The plot makes no sense, but that retro-futuristic Tomorrowland vibe and superb cast make it (mostly) work.

Marvel Studios officially kicked off Phase Six of its cinematic universe with the release of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and the film is already garnering solid reviews and a strong start at the box office. The cast is terrific across the board, and the production design is, well, pretty darn fantastic, evoking Disney's Tomorrowland (the park, not the film) with its 1960s retro-alt-future aesthetic. Just let your brain relax and don't try to make too much of the nonsensical plot.

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

Director Matt Shakman (WandaVision) took a page from James Gunn's Superman playbook and skipped the usual origin story for our heroes. How the Fantastic Four acquired their unique abilities is recapped via brief flashbacks, along with some of their early exploits, thanks to the Four being featured celebrities on a popular talk show hosted by Ted Gilbert (Mark Gatiss). Reed Richard/Mister Fantastic (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm/Invisible Woman (Vanessa Kirby) are even expecting their first child, to the delight of Johnny Storm/Human Torch (Joseph Quinn) and Ben Grimm/The Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach).

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Bankrupt Futurehome suddenly makes its smart home hub a subscription service

The connected devices now only work manually without a subscription.

Smart home device maker Futurehome is forcing its customers’ hands by suddenly requiring a subscription for basic functionality of its products.

Launched in 2016, Futurehome’s Smarthub is marketed as a central hub for controlling Internet-connected devices in smart homes. For years, the Norwegian company sold its products, which also include smart thermostats, smart lighting, and smart fire and carbon monoxide alarms, for a one-time fee that included access to its companion app and cloud platform for control and automation. As of June 26, though, those core features require a 1,188 NOK (about $116.56) annual subscription fee, turning the smart home devices into dumb ones if users don't pay up.

“You lose access to controlling devices, configuring; automations, modes, shortcuts, and energy services,” a company FAQ page says.

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Trump caving on Nvidia H20 export curbs may disrupt his bigger trade war

China’s frontier AI will be fueled by Nvidia H20 chips, experts warn Trump.

The next front in Donald Trump's trade war will be chip tariffs—which could come by next month—but national security experts are warning that the president may have already made a huge misstep that threatens to disrupt both US trade and national security.

In a letter Monday to Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, 20 policymakers and professionals with a background in national security policy urged Trump to reverse course and block exports of Nvidia's H20 chips to China.

In April, the Trump administration decided against imposing additional export curbs on H20 chips after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang paid $1 million for a seat at a Mar-a-Lago dinner, NPR reported. Apparently, Nvidia's promise to invest $500 billion in AI data centers helped persuade Trump to change course, as did the terms of a temporary truce with China, in which the US promised to halt H20 chip controls in exchange for China restoring imports of rare earth minerals into the US.

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Blender developers begin work on full-fledged mobile version

Support will come to the iPad Pro first, with other platforms to follow.

Popular open source 3D modeling tool Blender's social media channels and subreddit have regularly seen people asking for a tablet version for years now. And according to a blog post by Dalai Felinto from the Blender team, the developers of the application have now committed to build just that.

"The idea is to bring the full power of Blender to these devices," the blog post explains. "This requires adapting to platform-specific paradigms, but also to offer more task-oriented user interfaces with reduced information density. This will be achieved by extending existing input methods and improving workspaces and application templates, running on top of a regular Blender build."

The long-term goal is to build out not just a standalone tablet interface, but to offer the same advantages something like an iPad Pro offers to PC-connected graphics tablet peripherals, too—and it goes both ways. Ultimately, a standalone tablet + a keyboard and trackpad should offer the same experience as on desktop, and a desktop PC with a graphics tablet should be the same as a standalone tablet in terms of experience.

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OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent casually clicks through “I am not a robot” verification test

“This step is necessary to prove I’m not a bot,” wrote the bot as it passed an anti-AI screening step.

Maybe they should change the button to say, "I am a robot"?

On Friday, OpenAI's new ChatGPT Agent, which can perform multistep tasks for users, proved it can pass through one of the Internet's most common security checkpoints by clicking Cloudflare's anti-bot verification—the same checkbox that's supposed to keep automated programs like itself at bay.

ChatGPT Agent is a feature that allows OpenAI's AI assistant to control its own web browser, operating within a sandboxed environment with its own virtual operating system and browser that can access the real Internet. Users can watch the AI's actions through a window in the ChatGPT interface, maintaining oversight while the agent completes tasks. The system requires user permission before taking actions with real-world consequences, such as making purchases. Recently, Reddit users discovered the agent could do something particularly ironic.

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How the Trump FCC justified requiring a “bias monitor” at CBS

Trump FCC claims there’s precedent for CBS ombudsman, but it’s a weak one.

The Federal Communications Commission's approval of CBS owner Paramount's $8 billion merger with Skydance came with a condition to install an ombudsman, which FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has described as a "bias monitor." It appears that the bias monitor will make sure the news company's reporting meets standards demanded by President Donald Trump.

"One of the things they're going to have to do is put an ombudsman in place for two years, so basically a bias monitor that will report directly to the president [of Paramount]," Carr told Newsmax on Thursday, right after the FCC announced its approval of the merger.

The Carr FCC claims there is precedent for such a bias monitor. But the precedent cited in last week's merger approval points to a very different case involving NBC and GE, one in which an ombudsman was used to protect NBC's editorial independence from interference by its new owner.

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Nude women streamed to office TV derail Oklahoma Board of Education meeting

Police are now involved.

According to US News and World Report, the state of Oklahoma ranks 48th in the United States for its pre-K to 12th grade education system. But the current hot-button issue consuming the Oklahoma State Board of Education isn't about improving this position; it's about whether someone was streaming video of nude women gathered around a "chiropractic table" to a TV visible during a Board of Education meeting last week.

Indeed, so serious has the issue become that it has already progressed from a media complaint to a state probe to an Oklahoma County Sheriff's Office investigation in just a few days.

State House Speaker Kyle Hilbert (R) is already suggesting that Superintendent Ryan Walters, the state's hard-right head of education—the man who wants to put Bibles in every classroom—"unlock and turn over all relevant devices and fully cooperate with an investigation."

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SZBOX DS156 is the latest take on a 15.6 inch notebook with an integrated 7-inch tablet

SZBOX has started selling a new 15.6″ laptop on its AliExpress store. The most intriguing feature of the SZBOX DS156 is the 7-inch tablet situated to the right of its keyboard and touchpad. This isn’t a new idea by any means. Lenovo offered…

SZBOX has started selling a new 15.6″ laptop on its AliExpress store. The most intriguing feature of the SZBOX DS156 is the 7-inch tablet situated to the right of its keyboard and touchpad. This isn’t a new idea by any means. Lenovo offered a high-end 17.3″ ThinkPad with an 8-inch secondary screen back in 2022. […]

The post SZBOX DS156 is the latest take on a 15.6 inch notebook with an integrated 7-inch tablet appeared first on Liliputing.

Pro-Ukrainian hackers take credit for attack that snarls Russian flight travel

State-owned Aeroflot cancels dozens of flights, stranding travelers throughout Russia.

Russia’s biggest airline cancelled dozens of flights on Monday following a failure of the state-owned company’s IT systems and, according to a Russian lawmaker and pro-Ukrainian hackers, was the result of a cyberattack, it was widely reported.

The airline, Aeroflot, said it cancelled about 40 flights following a “technical failure.” An online departure board for Sheremetyevo airport showed dozens of others were delayed. The cancellations and delays hobbled traffic throughout Russia and left travelers stranded at airports. The affected routes were mostly within Russia but also included routes to Belarusian capital Minsk and Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.

“The damage is strategic”

Russian prosecutors confirmed to Reuters that the disruption was caused by a hack and have opened a criminal investigation into it. Russian lawmakers also hinted a cyberattack was the cause of the outage, with one of them, Anton Gorelkin, saying Russia was under digital attack, possibly at the hands of hacktivists with help from unfriendly states.

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