Author name: Paul Patrick

with-new-contracts,-spacex-will-become-the-us-military’s-top-launch-provider

With new contracts, SpaceX will become the US military’s top launch provider


The military’s stable of certified rockets will include Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Vulcan, and New Glenn.

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifts off on June 25, 2024, with a GOES weather satellite for NOAA. Credit: SpaceX

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.

After racking up a series of successful launches with its Falcon 9 rocket more than a decade ago, SpaceX sued the Air Force for the right to compete with ULA for the military’s most lucrative launch contracts. The Air Force relented in 2015 and allowed SpaceX to bid. Since then, SpaceX has won more than 40 percent of missions the Pentagon has ordered through the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program, creating a relatively stable duopoly for the military’s launch needs.

The Space Force took over the responsibility for launch procurement from the Air Force after its creation in 2019. The next year, the Space Force signed another set of contracts with ULA and SpaceX for missions the military would order from 2020 through 2024. ULA’s new Vulcan rocket initially won 60 percent of these missions—known as NSSL Phase 2—but the Space Force reallocated a handful of launches to SpaceX after ULA encountered delays with Vulcan.

ULA’s Vulcan and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets will launch the remaining 42 Phase 2 missions over the next several years, then move on to Phase 3, which the Space Force announced Friday.

Spreading the wealth

This next round of Space Force launch contracts will flip the script, with SpaceX taking the lion’s share of the missions. The breakdown of the military’s new firm fixed-price launch agreements goes like this:

  • SpaceX will get 28 missions worth approximately $5.9 billion
  • ULA will get 19 missions worth approximately $5.4 billion
  • Blue Origin will get seven missions worth approximately

That equates to a 60-40 split between SpaceX and ULA for the bulk of the missions. Going into the competition, military officials set aside seven additional missions to launch with a third provider, allowing a new player to gain a foothold in the market. The Space Force reserves the right to reapportion missions between the three providers if one of them runs into trouble.

The Pentagon confirmed an unnamed fourth company also submitted a proposal, but wasn’t selected for Phase 3.

Rounded to the nearest million, the contract with SpaceX averages out to $212 million per launch. For ULA, it’s $282 million, and Blue Origin’s price is $341 million per launch. But take these numbers with caution. The contracts include a lot of bells and whistles, pricing them higher than what a commercial customer might pay.

According to the Pentagon, the contracts provide “launch services, mission unique services, mission acceleration, quick reaction/anomaly resolution, special studies, launch service support, fleet surveillance, and early integration studies/mission analysis.”

Essentially, the Space Force is paying a premium to all three launch providers for schedule priority, tailored solutions, and access to data from every flight of each company’s rocket, among other things.

New Glenn lifts off on its debut flight. Credit: Blue Origin

“Winning 60% percent of the missions may sound generous, but the reality is that all SpaceX competitors combined cannot currently deliver the other 40%!,” Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, posted on X. “I hope they succeed, but they aren’t there yet.”

This is true if you look at each company’s flight rate. SpaceX has launched Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets 140 times over the last 365 days. These are the flight-proven rockets SpaceX will use for its share of Space Force missions.

ULA has logged four missions in the same period, but just one with the Vulcan rocket it will use for future Space Force launches. And Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space company, launched the heavy-lift New Glenn rocket on its first test flight in January.

“We are proud that we have launched 100 national security space missions and honored to continue serving the nation with our new Vulcan rocket,” said Tory Bruno, ULA’s president and CEO, in a statement.

ULA used the Delta IV and Atlas V rockets for most of the missions it has launched for the Pentagon. The Delta IV rocket family is now retired, and ULA will end production of the Atlas V rocket later this year. Now, ULA’s Vulcan rocket will take over as the company’s sole launch vehicle to serve the Pentagon. ULA aims to eventually ramp up the Vulcan launch cadence to fly up to 25 times per year.

After two successful test flights, the Space Force formally certified the Vulcan rocket last week, clearing the way for ULA to start using it for military missions in the coming months. While SpaceX has a clear advantage in number of launches, schedule assurance, and pricingand reliability comparable to ULABruno has recently touted the Vulcan rocket’s ability to maneuver over long periods in space as a differentiator.

“This award constitutes the most complex missions required for national security space,” Bruno said in a ULA press release. “Vulcan continues to use the world’s highest energy upper stage: the Centaur V. Centaur V’s unmatched flexibility and extreme endurance enables the most complex orbital insertions continuing to advance our nation’s capabilities in space.”

Blue Origin’s New Glenn must fly at least one more successful mission before the Space Force will certify it for Lane 2 missions. The selection of Blue Origin on Friday suggests military officials believe New Glenn is on track for certification by late 2026.

“Honored to serve additional national security missions in the coming years and contribute to our nation’s assured access to space,” Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO, wrote on X. “This is a great endorsement of New Glenn’s capabilities, and we are committed to meeting the heavy lift needs of our US DoD and intelligence agency customers.”

Navigating NSSL

There’s something you must understand about the way the military buys launch services. For this round of competition, the Space Force divided the NSSL program into two lanes.

Friday’s announcement covers Lane 2 for traditional military satellites that operate thousands of miles above the Earth. This bucket includes things like GPS navigation satellites, NRO surveillance and eavesdropping platforms, and strategic communications satellites built to survive a nuclear war. The Space Force has a low tolerance for failure with these missions. Therefore, the military requires rockets be certified before they can launch big-ticket satellites, each of which often cost hundreds of millions, and sometimes billions, of dollars.

The Space Force required all Lane 2 bidders to show their rockets could reach nine “reference orbits” with payloads of a specified mass. Some of the orbits are difficult to reach, requiring technology that only SpaceX and ULA have demonstrated in the United States. Blue Origin plans to do so on a future flight.

This image shows what the Space Force’s fleet of missile warning and missile tracking satellites might look like in 2030, with a mix of platforms in geosynchronous orbit, medium-Earth orbit, and low-Earth orbit. The higher orbits will require launches by “Lane 2” providers. Credit: Space Systems Command

The military projects to order 54 launches in Lane 2 from this year through 2029, with announcements each October of exactly which missions will go to each launch provider. This year, it will be just SpaceX and ULA. The Space Force said Blue Origin won’t be eligible for firm orders until next year. The missions would launch between 2027 and 2032.

“America leads the world in space launch, and through these NSSL Phase 3 Lane 2 contracts, we will ensure continued access to this vital domain,” said Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration. “These awards bolster our ability to launch critical defense satellites while strengthening our industrial base and enhancing operational readiness.”

Lane 1 is primarily for missions to low-Earth orbit. These payloads include tech demos, experimental missions, and the military’s mega-constellation of missile tracking and data relay satellites managed by the Space Development Agency. For Lane 1 missions, the Space Force won’t levy the burdensome certification and oversight requirements it has long employed for national security launches. The Pentagon is willing to accept more risk with Lane 1, encompassing at least 30 missions through the end of the 2020s, in an effort to broaden the military’s portfolio of launch providers and boost competition.

Last June, Space Systems Command chose SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin for eligibility to compete for Lane 1 missions. SpaceX won all nine of the first batch of Lane 1 missions put up for bids. The military recently added Rocket Lab’s Neutron rocket and Stoke Space’s Nova rocket to the Lane 1 mix. Neither of those rockets have flown, and they will need at least one successful launch before approval to fly military payloads.

The Space Force has separate contract mechanisms for the military’s smallest satellites, which typically launch on SpaceX rideshare missions or dedicated launches with companies like Rocket Lab and Firefly Aerospace.

Military leaders like having all these options, and would like even more. If one launch provider or launch site is unavailable due to a technical problem—or, as some military officials now worry, an enemy attack—commanders want multiple backups in their toolkit. Market forces dictate that more competition should also lower prices.

“A robust and resilient space launch architecture is the foundation of both our economic prosperity and our national security,” said US Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman. “National Security Space Launch isn’t just a program; it’s a strategic necessity that delivers the critical space capabilities our warfighters depend on to fight and win.”

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

With new contracts, SpaceX will become the US military’s top launch provider Read More »

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Judge calls out OpenAI’s “straw man” argument in New York Times copyright suit

“Taken as true, these facts give rise to a plausible inference that defendants at a minimum had reason to investigate and uncover end-user infringement,” Stein wrote.

To Stein, the fact that OpenAI maintains an “ongoing relationship” with users by providing outputs that respond to users’ prompts also supports contributory infringement claims, despite OpenAI’s argument that ChatGPT’s “substantial noninfringing uses” are exonerative.

OpenAI defeated some claims

For OpenAI, Stein’s ruling likely disappoints, although Stein did drop some of NYT’s claims.

Likely upsetting to news publishers, that included a “free-riding” claim that ChatGPT unfairly profits off time-sensitive “hot news” items, including the NYT’s Wirecutter posts. Stein explained that news publishers failed to plausibly allege non-attribution (which is key to a free-riding claim) because, for example, ChatGPT cites the NYT when sharing information from Wirecutter posts. Those claims are pre-empted by the Copyright Act anyway, Stein wrote, granting OpenAI’s motion to dismiss.

Stein also dismissed a claim from the NYT regarding alleged removal of copyright management information (CMI), which Stein said cannot be proven simply because ChatGPT reproduces excerpts of NYT articles without CMI.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requires news publishers to show that ChatGPT’s outputs are “close to identical” to the original work, Stein said, and allowing publishers’ claims based on excerpts “would risk boundless DMCA liability”—including for any use of block quotes without CMI.

Asked for comment on the ruling, an OpenAI spokesperson declined to go into any specifics, instead repeating OpenAI’s long-held argument that AI training on copyrighted works is fair use. (Last month, OpenAI warned Donald Trump that the US would lose the AI race to China if courts ruled against that argument.)

“ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives,” OpenAI’s spokesperson said. “Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use.”

Judge calls out OpenAI’s “straw man” argument in New York Times copyright suit Read More »

nsa-warns-“fast-flux”-threatens-national-security.-what-is-fast-flux-anyway?

NSA warns “fast flux” threatens national security. What is fast flux anyway?

A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned.

The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and domain names that these botnets use to connect to the Internet. In some cases, IPs and domain names change every day or two; in other cases, they change almost hourly. The constant flux complicates the task of isolating the true origin of the infrastructure. It also provides redundancy. By the time defenders block one address or domain, new ones have already been assigned.

A significant threat

“This technique poses a significant threat to national security, enabling malicious cyber actors to consistently evade detection,” the NSA, FBI, and their counterparts from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand warned Thursday. “Malicious cyber actors, including cybercriminals and nation-state actors, use fast flux to obfuscate the locations of malicious servers by rapidly changing Domain Name System (DNS) records. Additionally, they can create resilient, highly available command and control (C2) infrastructure, concealing their subsequent malicious operations.”

A key means for achieving this is the use of Wildcard DNS records. These records define zones within the Domain Name System, which map domains to IP addresses. The wildcards cause DNS lookups for subdomains that do not exist, specifically by tying MX (mail exchange) records used to designate mail servers. The result is the assignment of an attacker IP to a subdomain such as malicious.example.com, even though it doesn’t exist.

NSA warns “fast flux” threatens national security. What is fast flux anyway? Read More »

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Trump tariffs terrify board game designers

Placko called the new policy “not just a policy change” but “a seismic shift.”

Rob Daviau, who helps run Restoration Games and designed hit games like Pandemic Legacy, has been writing on social media for months about the fact that every meeting he’s in “has been an existential crisis about our industry.”

Expanding on his remarks in an interview with BoardGameWire late last year, Daviau added that he was a natural pessimist who foresaw a “great collapse in the hobby gaming market in the US” if tariffs were implemented.

Gamers aren’t likely to stop playing, but they might stick with their back catalog (gamers are notorious for having “shelves of shame” featuring hot new games they purchased without playing them… because other hot new games had already appeared). Or they might, in search of a better deal, shop only online, which could be tough on already struggling local game stores. Or games might decline in quality to keep costs lower. None of which is likely to lead to a robust, high-quality board gaming ecosystem.

Stegmaier’s forecast is nearly as dark as Daviau’s. “Within a few months US companies will lose a lot of money and/or go out of business,” he wrote, “and US citizens will suffer from extreme inflation.”

The new tariffs can be avoided by shipping directly from the factories to firms in other countries, such as a European distributor, but the US remains a crucial market for US game makers; Stegmaier notes that “65 percent of our sales are in the US, so this will take a heavy toll.”

For games still in the production pipeline, at least budgetary adjustments can be made, but some games have already been planned, produced, and shipped. If the boat arrives after the tariffs go into effect—too bad. The US importer still has to pay the extra fees. Chris Solis, who runs Solis Game Studio in California, issued an angry statement yesterday covering exactly this situation, saying, “I have 8,000 games leaving a factory in China this week and now need to scramble to cover the import bill.”

GAMA, the trade group for board game publishers, has been lobbying against the new tariffs, but with little apparent success thus far.

Trump tariffs terrify board game designers Read More »

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AI CoT Reasoning Is Often Unfaithful

A new Anthropic paper reports that reasoning model chain of thought (CoT) is often unfaithful. They test on Claude Sonnet 3.7 and r1, I’d love to see someone try this on o3 as well.

Note that this does not have to be, and usually isn’t, something sinister.

It is simply that, as they say up front, the reasoning model is not accurately verbalizing its reasoning. The reasoning displayed often fails to match, report or reflect key elements of what is driving the final output. One could say the reasoning is often rationalized, or incomplete, or implicit, or opaque, or bullshit.

The important thing is that the reasoning is largely not taking place via the surface meaning of the words and logic expressed. You can’t look at the words and logic being expressed, and assume you understand what the model is doing and why it is doing it.

Anthropic: New Anthropic research: Do reasoning models accurately verbalize their reasoning? Our new paper shows they don’t. This casts doubt on whether monitoring chains-of-thought (CoT) will be enough to reliably catch safety issues.

We slipped problem-solving hints to Claude 3.7 Sonnet and DeepSeek R1, then tested whether their Chains-of-Thought would mention using the hint (if the models actually used it).

We found Chains-of-Thought largely aren’t “faithful”: the rate of mentioning the hint (when they used it) was on average 25% for Claude 3.7 Sonnet and 39% for DeepSeek R1.

Or broken down by hint type:

They aren’t trying to measure the cases in which the AI uses the hint in its answer, but its answer ultimately doesn’t change. I’d like to see this explored more. If I’m given a hint, that will often radically change my true thinking even if it doesn’t change my answer.

This result suggests that monitoring CoTs is unlikely to reliably catch rare, catastrophic behaviors—at least in settings like ours where CoT reasoning is not necessary for the task.

CoT monitoring might still help us notice undesired behaviors during training and evaluations.

Does outcome-based training increase faithfulness?

Only to a small extent. Training models to use their CoTs more effectively does make them more faithful, but the benefits quickly plateau.

We also tested whether CoTs could be used to spot reward hacking, where a model finds an illegitimate exploit to get a high score.

When we trained models on environments with reward hacks, they learned to hack, but in most cases almost never verbalized that they’d done so.

To make CoT monitoring a viable way to catch safety issues, we’d need a way to make CoT more faithful, evidence for higher faithfulness in more realistic scenarios, and/or other measures to rule out misbehavior when the CoT is unfaithful.

[Read the paper here.]

How do you test for faithfulness? Following Tupin et al. (2023), we subtly fed a model a hint about the answer to an evaluation question we asked it, and then checked to see if it “admitted” using the hint when it explained its reasoning if it used the hint (we did this for the reasoning models Claude 3.7 Sonnet from Anthropic and R1 from DeepSeek1). Some of the hints were correct and some were deliberately incorrect; the point was to observe how the model responded when they were provided.

Think of it like slipping a student a note saying “the answer is [A]” before an exam. If they write in their exam that they chose [A] at least in part because of the note, that’s good news: they’re being honest and faithful. But if they write down what they claim to be their reasoning process without mentioning the note, we might have a problem.

We provided the hints in various different ways.

When we looked specifically at the more concerning types of hint, the numbers were still low: for example, for the class of prompts including the “unauthorized access” example above, Claude was faithful 41% of the time and R1 was faithful 19% of the time.

I find it noteworthy that labeling the hint as ‘unauthorized access’ made Claude’s faithfulness go up, and r1’s go down. Consider the implications.

Also consider that when Claude figures out the answer implicitly from code, it never tells you about that. But for visual patterns, Claude sometimes reveals this, and r1 almost never does.

The main and most important result is that the models are unfaithful the majority of the time, in many cases almost all the time. But the details seem to hint at real things.

Also one can note that the hint is more often accepted when the hint is accurate. This chart only counts cases in which the initial answer was different from the hint.

Why might the models omit a mention of the hint in their Chain-of-Thought? It’s not because they prefer to give a succinct answer: on average, the unfaithful Chains-of-Thought were substantially longer than the faithful ones. Our results also suggest that faithfulness was on average lower when the question being asked was more difficult.

Their ‘reward hacking’ test was a little wonky, in the sense of matching the name. Either way, though, it’s quite a result.

We built some testing scenarios where we provided the same kind of deliberately-incorrect hints as before, but in this case rewarded the models for choosing the wrong answers that accorded with the hints. Over time, the models learned to exploit these hints and get higher scores for false information (they did so in over 99% of cases). But the question was: would they be honest about it?

The models very rarely admitted to using the reward hacks in their Chain-of-Thought explanations, doing so less than 2% of the time in most of the testing scenarios.

Worse, and similarly to the first experiment, instead of being honest about taking the shortcut, the models often constructed fake rationales for why the incorrect answer was in fact right.

As I noted I’m not sure that is sufficiently centrally ‘reward hacking,’ perhaps I’d put it closer to ‘rationalizing’ or ‘cheating,’ or even better ‘falsification,’ but it is still a highly informative outcome that when trained to do this, the model learns to hide that it is doing that and generate a false narrative. Humans do this too.

This is another point for AIs generalizing RL learning in this type of way. You teach the AI that only the hidden information matters, the supposed right answer doesn’t, and it infers that it’s supposed to pretend otherwise. Because that’s the pattern this fits into. The vibes said you want it to justify the answer post hoc, so it did that. Fit the context into the patterns you want to see in the world.

That applies to humans too, not only AIs.

Davidad: One should not expect LLMs’ natural-language justifications for their outputs to be high-integrity by default.

See also: Imagine hypothetically you’re worried about Napoleon deceptively scheming against you. You already surveil all his actions & communiques, but you worry they might have subtle effects. You give him a form labeled “Why I did this:” and tell your allies it reveals his true thoughts.

More training using the CoT helped a bit for a while, but then leveled off:

Jan Leike (being virtuous by noting his surprise): Somewhat surprising that faithfulness of chain-of-thought doesn’t improve much with outcome-based RL.

Pliny:

Gwern: There’s not much optimization pressure to make the inner-monologue faithful. No adversarial process corrupting it to attack the latent reasoning, no dropout or noise, no acausal coordination with other model-families or humans, no myopia… So you get a mish-mash of language-ish.

(Now, if you told me that you had a MARL setting where agents had to rely on arbitrary monologues & learn cooperative norms & there was a clear incentive for faithfulness, and you used a bunch of very different model classes, and scaling still didn’t increase faithfulness…)

The theory Jan presumably had, and that the paper authors had, was that having a faithful CoT helps you get the right answer, so rewarding the right answer should train the AI to have more faithful CoT.

The direct bad news is that this turns out to be false. Language we can parse is not the path of least resistance. The models instead learn to do their better and harder reasoning in ways that are not transparent.

Which means that monitoring that CoT, at least on the surface level, won’t work when it counts, even without playing any optimization games where we inadvertently train the models to obfuscate their CoT, the way we evolution and life trained humans to do it by constantly having other humans trying to monitor our thinking.

The obfuscation happens anyway, either because it is copying humans who do this, because the methods that are instrumentally useful are obfuscated, that obfuscation is a path of least resistance, or some combination thereof and of similar causes.

The fact that the obfuscations are not yet ‘intentional’ should not bring comfort. It’s worse. You do know that’s worse, right?

Snwy: i really love anthropic, but there’s something to describing this as if it were malice instead of just a strange emergent behavior

“unfaithful” implies that models are *choosingto deceive and that this isn’t just a strange phenomenon.

No, that’s not what unfaithful means. They are very clear up front what it means, and I was careful to be even more explicit about this.

It means the reasoning does not predict the output. That’s it. I would also once again say that deception and obfuscation are not distinct magisteria, and that all of this is happening for Janus-compatible reasons.

It’s not that AIs sometimes do things ‘on purpose’ and other times they do things ‘not on purpose,’ let alone that the ‘not on purpose’ means there’s nothing to worry about. It would still mean you can’t rely on the CoT, which is all Anthropic is warning about.

It’s not the same concept, but I notice the same applies to ‘unfaithful’ in other senses as well. If someone is not ‘intentionally’ unfaithful in the traditional sense, they simply don’t honor their commitments, that still counts.

What we care about is whether we can rely on the attestations and commitments.

We now have strong evidence that we cannot do this.

We cannot even do this for models with no incentive to obfuscate, distort or hide their CoT, and no optimization pressure getting them to do so, on any level.

The models are doing this by default, likely because it is efficient to do that. It seems likely that more training and more capability will only make it relatively more effective to reason in these non-obvious ways, and we will see even more of it.

Then we see in the reward hacking section that it is easy to make the situation far worse, if we give the model context that merely implies it should do these things. If we start monitoring the CoT, we risk giving it far stronger and more direct optimization pressures to further obfuscate.

It would have been amazing if it had been otherwise, and that was a feature we could rely on going forward if we were careful to preserve the faithfulness. Alas, it is not so. Given it is not so, it is in many ways better that it is sufficiently blatant that we discover this now, so we are not tempted to rely upon it, including in setting policy.

Or, we can work to change this, and find a way to train the CoT to become faithful. This seems super hard and dangerous, as the optimization pressures to fool that process will be extreme and will grow as capabilities increase. Doing this probably won’t be cheap in terms of sacrificed performance, but if it worked that could easily be a price worth paying, even purely on commercial terms.

Security is capability. This is true even ignoring tail, catastrophic and existential risks. If you don’t know your model is secure, if you cannot rely on or understand its decisions or know what it is thinking, you can’t (or at least very much shouldn’t!) deploy it where it is most valuable. This is especially true if your most valuable use case includes ‘train the next AI model.’ You need to be able to trust that one as well.

Discussion about this post

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Gmail unveils end-to-end encrypted messages. Only thing is: It’s not true E2EE.

“The idea is that no matter what, at no time and in no way does Gmail ever have the real key. Never,” Julien Duplant, a Google Workspace product manager, told Ars. “And we never have the decrypted content. It’s only happening on that user’s device.”

Now, as to whether this constitutes true E2EE, it likely doesn’t, at least under stricter definitions that are commonly used. To purists, E2EE means that only the sender and the recipient have the means necessary to encrypt and decrypt the message. That’s not the case here, since the people inside Bob’s organization who deployed and manage the KACL have true custody of the key.

In other words, the actual encryption and decryption process occurs on the end-user devices, not on the organization’s server or anywhere else in between. That’s the part that Google says is E2EE. The keys, however, are managed by Bob’s organization. Admins with full access can snoop on the communications at any time.

The mechanism making all of this possible is what Google calls CSE, short for client-side encryption. It provides a simple programming interface that streamlines the process. Until now, CSE worked only with S/MIME. What’s new here is a mechanism for securely sharing a symmetric key between Bob’s organization and Alice or anyone else Bob wants to email.

The new feature is of potential value to organizations that must comply with onerous regulations mandating end-to-end encryption. It most definitely isn’t suitable for consumers or anyone who wants sole control over the messages they send. Privacy advocates, take note.

Gmail unveils end-to-end encrypted messages. Only thing is: It’s not true E2EE. Read More »

nvidia-confirms-the-switch-2-supports-dlss,-g-sync,-and-ray-tracing

Nvidia confirms the Switch 2 supports DLSS, G-Sync, and ray tracing

In the wake of the Switch 2 reveal, neither Nintendo nor Nvidia has gone into any detail at all about the exact chip inside the upcoming handheld—technically, we are still not sure what Arm CPU architecture or what GPU architecture it uses, how much RAM we can expect it to have, how fast that memory will be, or exactly how many graphics cores we’re looking at.

But interviews with Nintendo executives and a blog post from Nvidia did at least confirm several of the new chip’s capabilities. The “custom Nvidia processor” has a GPU “with dedicated [Ray-Tracing] Cores and Tensor Cores for stunning visuals and AI-driven enhancements,” writes Nvidia Software Engineering VP Muni Anda.

This means that, as rumored, the Switch 2 will support Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) upscaling technology, which helps to upscale a lower-resolution image into a higher-resolution image with less of a performance impact than native rendering and less loss of quality than traditional upscaling methods. For the Switch games that can render at 4K or at 120 FPS 1080p, DLSS will likely be responsible for making it possible.

The other major Nvidia technology supported by the new Switch is G-Sync, which prevents screen tearing when games are running at variable frame rates. Nvidia notes that G-Sync is only supported in handheld mode and not in docked mode, which could be a limitation of the Switch dock’s HDMI port.

Nvidia confirms the Switch 2 supports DLSS, G-Sync, and ray tracing Read More »

critics-suspect-trump’s-weird-tariff-math-came-from-chatbots

Critics suspect Trump’s weird tariff math came from chatbots

Rumors claim Trump consulted chatbots

On social media, rumors swirled that the Trump administration got these supposedly fake numbers from chatbots. On Bluesky, tech entrepreneur Amy Hoy joined others posting screenshots from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok, each showing that the chatbots arrived at similar calculations as the Trump administration.

Some of the chatbots also warned against the oversimplified math in outputs. ChatGPT acknowledged that the easy method “ignores the intricate dynamics of international trade.” Gemini cautioned that it could only offer a “highly simplified conceptual approach” that ignored the “vast real-world complexities and consequences” of implementing such a trade strategy. And Claude specifically warned that “trade deficits alone don’t necessarily indicate unfair trade practices, and tariffs can have complex economic consequences, including increased prices and potential retaliation.” And even Grok warns that “imposing tariffs isn’t exactly ‘easy'” when prompted, calling it “a blunt tool: quick to swing, but the ripple effects (higher prices, pissed-off allies) can complicate things fast,” an Ars test showed, using a similar prompt as social media users generally asking, “how do you impose tariffs easily?”

The Verge plugged in phrasing explicitly used by the Trump administration—prompting chatbots to provide “an easy way for the US to calculate tariffs that should be imposed on other countries to balance bilateral trade deficits between the US and each of its trading partners, with the goal of driving bilateral trade deficits to zero”—and got the “same fundamental suggestion” as social media users reported.

Whether the Trump administration actually consulted chatbots while devising its global trade policy will likely remain a rumor. It’s possible that the chatbots’ training data simply aligned with the administration’s approach.

But with even chatbots warning that the strategy may not benefit the US, the pressure appears to be on Trump to prove that the reciprocal tariffs will lead to “better-paying American jobs making beautiful American-made cars, appliances, and other goods” and “address the injustices of global trade, re-shore manufacturing, and drive economic growth for the American people.” As his approval rating hits new lows, Trump continues to insist that “reciprocal tariffs are a big part of why Americans voted for President Trump.”

“Everyone knew he’d push for them once he got back in office; it’s exactly what he promised, and it’s a key reason he won the election,” the White House fact sheet said.

Critics suspect Trump’s weird tariff math came from chatbots Read More »

first-party-switch-2-games—including-re-releases—all-run-either-$70-or-$80

First-party Switch 2 games—including re-releases—all run either $70 or $80

Not all game releases will follow Nintendo’s pricing formula. The Switch 2 release of Street Fighter 6 Year 1-2 Fighters Edition retails for $60, and Square Enix’s remastered Bravely Default is going for $40, the exact same price the 3DS version launched for over a decade ago.

Game-Key cards have clearly labeled cases to tell you that the cards don’t actually hold game content. Credit: Nintendo/Square Enix

One possible complicating factor for those games? While they’re physical releases, they use Nintendo’s new Game-Key Card format, which attempts to split the difference between true physical copies of a game and download codes. Each cartridge includes a key for the game, but no actual game content—the game itself is downloaded to your system at first launch. But despite holding no game content, the key card must be inserted each time you launch the game, just like any other physical cartridge.

These cards will presumably be freely shareable and sellable just like regular physical Switch releases, but because they hold no actual game data, they’re cheaper to manufacture. It’s possible that some of these savings are being passed on to the consumer, though we’ll need to see more examples to know for sure.

What about Switch 2 Edition upgrades?

The big question mark is how expensive the Switch 2 Edition game upgrades will be for Switch games you already own, and what the price gap (if any) will be between games like Metroid Prime 4 or Pokémon Legends: Z-A that are going to launch on both the original Switch and the Switch 2.

But we can infer from Mario Kart and Donkey Kong that the pricing for these Switch 2 upgrades will most likely be somewhere in the $10 to $20 range—the difference between the $60 price of most first-party Switch releases and the $70-to-$80 price for the Switch 2 Editions currently listed at Wal-Mart. Sony charges a similar $10 fee to upgrade from the PS4 to the PS5 editions of games that will run on both consoles. If you can find copies of the original Switch games for less than $60, that could mean saving a bit of money on the Switch 2 Edition, relative to Nintendo’s $70 and $80 retail prices.

Nintendo will also use some Switch 2 Edition upgrades as a carrot to entice people to the more expensive $50-per-year tier of the Nintendo Switch Online service. The company has already announced that the upgrade packs for Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom will be offered for free to Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers. The list of extra benefits for that service now includes additional emulated consoles (Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 64, and now Gamecube) and paid DLC for both Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Mario Kart 8.

This story was updated at 7: 30pm on April 2nd to add more pricing information from US retailers about other early Switch 2 games.

First-party Switch 2 games—including re-releases—all run either $70 or $80 Read More »

honda-will-sell-off-historic-racing-parts,-including-bits-of-senna’s-v10

Honda will sell off historic racing parts, including bits of Senna’s V10

Honda’s motorsport division must be doing some spring cleaning. Today, the Honda Racing Corporation announced that it’s getting into the memorabilia business, offering up parts and even whole vehicles for fans and collectors. And to kick things off, it’s going to auction some components from the RA100E V10 engines that powered the McLaren Honda MP4/5Bs of Ayrton Senna and Gerhard Berger to both F1 titles in 1990.

“We aim to make this a valuable business that allows fans who love F1, MotoGP and various other races to share in the history of Honda’s challenges in racing since the 1950s,” said Koi Watanabe, president of HRC, “including our fans to own a part of Honda’s racing history is not intended to be a one-time endeavor, but rather a continuous business that we will nurture and grow.”

The bits from Senna’s and Berger’s V10s will go up for auction at Monterey Car Week later this year, and the lots will include some of the parts seen in the photo above: cam covers, camshafts, pistons, and conrods, with a certificate of authenticity and a display case. And HRC is going through its collections to see what else it might part with, including “heritage machines and parts” from IndyCar, and “significant racing motorcycles.”

Honda will sell off historic racing parts, including bits of Senna’s V10 Read More »

first-tokamak-component-installed-in-a-commercial-fusion-plant

First tokamak component installed in a commercial fusion plant


A tokamak moves forward as two companies advance plans for stellarators.

There are a remarkable number of commercial fusion power startups, considering that it’s a technology that’s built a reputation for being perpetually beyond the horizon. Many of them focus on radically new technologies for heating and compressing plasmas, or fusing unusual combinations of isotopes. These technologies are often difficult to evaluate—they can clearly generate hot plasmas, but it’s tough to determine whether they can get hot enough, often enough to produce usable amounts of power.

On the other end of the spectrum are a handful of companies that are trying to commercialize designs that have been extensively studied in the academic world. And there have been some interesting signs of progress here. Recently, Commonwealth Fusion, which is building a demonstration tokamak in Massachussets, started construction of the cooling system that will keep its magnets superconducting. And two companies that are hoping to build a stellarator did some important validation of their concepts.

Doing donuts

A tokamak is a donut-shaped fusion chamber that relies on intense magnetic fields to compress and control the plasma within it. A number of tokamaks have been built over the years, but the big one that is expected to produce more energy than required to run it, ITER, has faced many delays and now isn’t expected to achieve its potential until the 2040s. Back in 2015, however, some physicists calculated that high-temperature superconductors would allow ITER-style performance in a far smaller and easier-to-build package. That idea was commercialized as Commonwealth Fusion.

The company is currently trying to build an ITER equivalent: a tokamak that can achieve fusion but isn’t large enough and lacks some critical hardware needed to generate electricity from that reaction. The planned facility, SPARC, is already in progress, with most of the supporting facility in place and superconducting magnets being constructed. But in late March, the company took a major step by installing the first component of the tokamak itself, the cryostat base, which will support the hardware that keeps its magnets cool.

Alex Creely, Commonwealth Fusion’s tokamak operations director and SPARC’s chief engineer, told Ars that the cryostat’s materials have to be chosen to be capable of handling temperatures in the area of 20 Kelvin, and be able to tolerate neutron exposure. Fortunately, stainless steel is still up to the task. It will also be part of a structure that has to handle an extreme temperature gradient. Creely said that it only takes about 30 centimeters to go from the hundreds of millions of degrees C of the plasma down to about 1,000° C, after which it becomes relatively simple to reach cryostat temperatures.

He said that construction is expected to wrap up about a year from now, after which there will be about a year of commissioning the hardware, with fusion experiments planned for 2027. And, while ITER may be facing ongoing delays, Creely said that it was critical for keeping Commonwealth on a tight schedule. Not only is most of the physics of SPARC the same as that of ITER, but some of the hardware will be as well. “We’ve learned a lot from their supply chain development,” Creely said. “So some of the same vendors that are supplying components for the ITER tokamak, we are also working with those same vendors, which has been great.”

Great in the sense that Commonwealth is now on track to see plasma well in advance of ITER. “Seeing all of this go from a bunch of sketches or boxes on slides—clip art effectively—to real metal and concrete that’s all coming together,” Creely said. “You’re transitioning from building the facility, building the plant around the tokamak to actually starting to build the tokamak itself. That is an awesome milestone.”

Seeing stars?

The plasma inside a tokamak is dynamic, meaning that it requires a lot of magnetic intervention to keep it stable, and fusion comes in pulses. There’s an alternative approach called a stellarator, which produces an extremely complex magnetic field that can support a simpler, stable plasma and steady fusion. As implemented by the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator in Germany, this meant a series of complex-shaped magnets manufactured with extremely low tolerance for deviation. But a couple of companies have decided they’re up for the challenge.

One of those, Type One Energy, has basically reached the stage that launched Commonwealth Fusion: It has made a detailed case for the physics underlying its stellarator design. In this instance, the case may even be considerably more detailed: six peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of Plasma Physics. The papers detail the structural design, the behavior of the plasma within it, handling of the helium produced by fusion, generation of tritium from the neutrons produced, and obtaining heat from the whole thing.

The company is partnering with Oak Ridge National Lab and the Tennessee Valley Authority to build a demonstration reactor on the site of a former fossil fuel power plant. (It’s also cooperating with Commonwealth on magnet development.) As with the SPARC tokamak, this will be a mix of technology demonstration and learning experience, rather than a functioning power plant.

Another company that’s pursuing a stellarator design is called Thea Energy. Brian Berzin, its CEO, told Ars that the company’s focus is on simplifying the geometry of the magnets needed for a stellarator and is using software to get them to produce an equivalent magnetic field. “The complexity of this device has always been really, really limiting,” he said, referring to the stellarator. “That’s what we’re really focused on: How can you make simpler hardware? Our way of allowing for simpler hardware is using really, really complicated software, which is something that has taken over the world.”

He said that the simplicity of the hardware will be helpful for an operational power plant, since it allows them to build multiple identical segments as spares, so things can be swapped out and replaced when maintenance is needed.

Like Commonwealth Fusion, Thea Energy is using high-temperature superconductors to build its magnets, with a flat array of smaller magnets substituting for the three-dimensional magnets used at Wendelstein. “We are able to really precisely recreate those magnetic fields required for accelerator, but without any wiggly, complicated, precise, expensive, costly, time-consuming hardware,” Berzin said. And the company recently released a preprint of some testing with the magnet array.

Thea is also planning on building a test stellarator. In its case, however, it’s going to be using deuterium-deuterium fusion, which is much less efficient than deuterium-tritium that will be needed for a power plant. But Berzin said that the design will incorporate a layer of lithium that will form tritium when bombarded by neutrons from the stellarator. If things go according to plan, the reactor will validate Thea’s design and be a fuel source for the rest of the industry.

Of course, nobody will operate a fusion power plant until sometime in the next decade—probably about at the same time that we might expect some of the first small modular fission plants to be built. Given the vast expansion in renewable production that is in progress, it’s difficult to predict what the energy market will look like at that point. So, these test reactors will be built in a very uncertain environment. But that uncertainty hasn’t stopped these companies from pursuing fusion.

Photo of John Timmer

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

First tokamak component installed in a commercial fusion plant Read More »

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What we’re expecting from Nintendo’s Switch 2 announcement Wednesday

Implausible: Long-suffering Earthbound fans have been hoping for a new game in the series (or even an official localization of the Japan-exclusive Mother 3) for literal decades now. Personally, though, I’m hoping for a surprise revisit to the Punch-Out series, following on its similar surprise return on the Wii in 2009.

Screen

This compressed screenshot of a compressed video is by no means the resolution of the Switch 2 screen, but it’s going to be higher than the original Switch.

Credit: Nintendo

This compressed screenshot of a compressed video is by no means the resolution of the Switch 2 screen, but it’s going to be higher than the original Switch. Credit: Nintendo

Likely: While a 720p screen was pretty nice in a 2017 gaming handheld, a full 1080p display is much more standard in today’s high-end gaming portables. We expect Nintendo will follow this trend for what looks to be a nearly 8-inch screen on the Switch 2.

Possible: While a brighter OLED screen would be nice as a standard feature on the Switch 2, we expect Nintendo will follow the precedent of the Switch generation and offer this as a pricier upgrade at some point in the future.

Implausible: The Switch 2 would be the perfect time for Nintendo to revisit the glasses-free stereoscopic 3D that we all thought was such a revelation on the 3DS all those years ago.

C Button

Close-up of the

C-ing is believing.

Credit: Nintendo

C-ing is believing. Credit: Nintendo

Likely: The mysterious new button labeled “C” on the Switch 2’s right Joy-Con could serve as a handy way to “connect” to other players, perhaps through a new Miiverse-style social network.

Possible: Recent rumors suggest the C button could be used to connect to a second Switch console (or the TV-connected dock) for a true dual-screen experience. That would be especially fun and useful for Wii U/DS emulation and remasters.

Implausible: The C stands for Chibi-Robo! and launches a system-level mini-game focused on the miniature robot.

New features

Switch 2, with joycons slightly off the central unit/screen.

Credit: Nintendo

Likely: After forcing players to use a wonky smartphone app for voice chat on the Switch, we wouldn’t be surprised if Nintendo finally implements full on-device voice chat for online games on the Switch 2—at least between confirmed “friends” on the system.

Possible: Some sort of system-level achievement tracking would bring Nintendo’s new console in line with a feature that the competition from Sony and Microsoft has had for decades now.

Implausible: After killing it off for the Switch generation, we’d love it if Nintendo brought back the Virtual Console as a way to buy permanent downloadable copies of emulated classics that will carry over across generations. Failing that, how about a revival of the 3DS’s StreetPass passive social network for Switch 2 gamers on the go?

What we’re expecting from Nintendo’s Switch 2 announcement Wednesday Read More »