Russia’s Soyuz 5 will soon come alive. But will anyone want to fly on it?

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Western market for satellite launches dried up.

After nearly a decade of development, Russia’s newest launch vehicle is close to its debut flight. The medium-lift Soyuz 5 rocket is expected to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome before the end of the year.

The Russian space corporation, Roscosmos, has released images of final processing of the Soyuz 5 rocket at the Progress Rocket and Space Center in Samara, Russia, earlier this month before the booster was shipped to the launch site in Kazakhstan. It arrived there on November 12.

Although the Soyuz 5 is a new vehicle, it does not represent a major leap forward in technology. Rather it is, in many ways, a conventional reaction to commercial boosters developed in the West as well as the country’s prolonged war against Ukraine. Whether this strategy will be successful remains to be seen.

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Vision Pro M5 review: It’s time for Apple to make some tough choices

A state of the union from someone who actually sort of uses the thing.

With the recent releases of visionOS 26 and newly refreshed Vision Pro hardware, it’s an ideal time to check in on Apple’s Vision Pro headset—a device I was simultaneously amazed and disappointed by when it launched in early 2024.

I still like the Vision Pro, but I can tell it’s hanging on by a thread. Content is light, developer support is tepid, and while Apple has taken action to improve both, it’s not enough, and I’m concerned it might be too late.

When I got a Vision Pro, I used it a lot: I watched movies on planes and in hotel rooms, I walked around my house placing application windows and testing out weird new ways of working. I tried all the neat games and educational apps, and I watched all the immersive videos I could get ahold of. I even tried my hand at developing my own applications for it.

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Qualcomm says Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 brings a big performance boost… over the 2-year-old Snapdragon 8 Gen 3

Last year Qualcomm revamped it naming conventions for flagship processors. Instead of launching a Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chip the company introduced a Snapdragon 8 Elite as the first mobile processor to feature Oryon CPU cores using some of the same techno…

Last year Qualcomm revamped it naming conventions for flagship processors. Instead of launching a Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chip the company introduced a Snapdragon 8 Elite as the first mobile processor to feature Oryon CPU cores using some of the same technologies Qualcomm uses for its laptop chips. But that change was short-lived, because in […]

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Crypto hoarders dump tokens as shares tumble

Several companies are selling crypto stockpiles in effort to fund share buybacks, shore up stock prices.

Crypto-hoarding companies are ditching their holdings in a bid to prop up their sinking share prices, as the craze for “digital asset treasury” businesses unravels in the face of a $1 trillion cryptocurrency rout.

Shares in Michael Saylor-led Strategy, the world’s biggest corporate bitcoin holder, have tumbled 50 percent over the past three months, dragging down scores of copycat companies.

About $77 billion has been wiped from the stock market value of these companies, which raise debt and equity to fund purchases of crypto, since their peak of $176 billion in July, according to industry data publication The Block.

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Tech firm’s new CTO gets indicted; company then claims he was never CTO

Corvex named Brian Raymond as CTO days before indictment for illegal chip exports.

When four people were arrested and charged with a conspiracy to illegally export Nvidia chips to China, there was an interesting side note. One of the arrestees, Alabama resident Brian Raymond, was the chief technology officer of an AI company called Corvex.

Or was he? Corvex certainly seemed to think that Raymond was its CTO in the days before his indictment. Corvex named Raymond as its CTO in a press release and filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which detailed plans for a merger with Movano Health.

But once Raymond was arrested, Corvex told media outlets that it had never completed the process of hiring him as an employee. While someone could technically be a CTO as a contractor and not a regular employee, a company spokesperson subsequently claimed to Ars that Raymond had never been the CTO.

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