australia

This 67,800-year-old hand stencil is the world’s oldest human-made art

anthropology, Archaeology, australia, cave art, hominins, human migration, Indonesia, rock art, Sahul, Science / Paul Patrick / January 24, 2026

generative AI could never

The world’s oldest art has an unintentional story to tell about human exploration.

These 17,000-year-old hand stencils from Liang Jarie Maros, in another area of Sulawesi, bear a striking resemblance to the much older ones in Liang Metanduno. Credit: OKtaviana et al. 2026

The world’s oldest surviving rock art is a faded outline of a hand on an Indonesian cave wall, left 67,800 years ago.

On a tiny island just off the coast of Sulawesi (a much larger island in Indonesia), a cave wall bears the stenciled outline of a person’s hand—and it’s at least 67,800 years old, according to a recent study. The hand stencil is now the world’s oldest work of art (at least until archaeologists find something even older), as well as the oldest evidence of our species on any of the islands that stretch between continental Asia and Australia.

Photo of an archaeologists examining a hand stencil painted on a cave wall, using a flashlight — Adhi Oktaviana examines a slightly more recent hand stencil on the wall of Liang Metanduno. Credit: Oktaviana et al. 2026

Hands reaching out from the past

Archaeologist Adhi Agus Oktaviana, of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency, and his colleagues have spent the last six years surveying 44 rock art sites, mostly caves, on Sulawesi’s southeastern peninsula and the handful of tiny “satellite islands” off its coast. They found 14 previously undocumented sites and used rock formations to date 11 individual pieces of rock art in eight caves—including the oldest human artwork discovered so far.

About 67,800 years ago, someone stood in the darkness of Liang Metanduno and placed their hand flat against the limestone wall. They, or maybe a friend, then blew a mixture of pigment and water onto the wall, covering and surrounding their hand. When they pulled their hand carefully away from the rock, careful not to disturb the still-wet paint, they left behind a crisp outline of their palm and fingers, haloed by a cloud of deep red.

The result is basically the negative of a handprint, and it’s a visceral, tangible link to the past. Someone once laid their hand on the cave wall right here, and you can still see its outline like a lingering ghost, reaching out from the other side of the rock. If you weren’t worried about damaging the already faded and fragile image, you could lay your hand in the same spot and meet them halfway.

Today, the stencil is so faded that you can barely see it, but if you look closely, it’s there: a faint halo of reddish-orange pigment, outlining the top part of a palm and the base of the fingers. A thin, nearly transparent layer of calcite covers the faded shape, left behind by millennia of water dripping down the cave wall. The ratio of uranium and thorium in a sheet of calcite suggests that it formed at least 71,000 years ago—so the outline of the hand beneath it must have been left behind sometime before that, probably around 67,800 years ago.

A photo of two figures on a cave wall, with the faint outline of a hand circled in black — The hand stencil is faded and overlain by more recent (but still ancient) artwork; it’s circled in black to help you find it in this photo. Credit: Oktaviana et al. 2026

That makes Liang Metanduno the home of the oldest known artwork in the world, beating the previous contender (a Neanderthal hand stencil in Spain) by about 1,100 years.

“These findings support the growing view that Sulawesi was host to a vibrant and longstanding artistic culture during the late Pleistocene epoch,” wrote Oktaviana and his colleagues in their recent paper.

The karst caves of Sulawesi’s southwestern peninsula, Maros-Pangkep, are a treasure trove of deeply ancient artwork: hand stencils, as well as drawings of wild animals, people, and strange figures that seem to blend the two. A cave wall at Liang Bulu’Sipong 4 features a 4.5-meter-long mural of humanlike figures facing off against wild pigs and dwarf buffalo, and a 2024 study pushed the mural’s age back to 51,200 years ago, making it the second-oldest artwork that we know of (after the Liang Metanduno hand stencil in the recent study).

Archaeologists have only begun to rediscover the rock art of Maros-Pangkep in the last decade or so, and other areas of the island, like Southeast Sulawesi and its tiny satellite islands, have received even less attention—so we don’t know what’s still there waiting for humanity to find again after dozens of millennia. We also don’t know what the ancient artist was trying to convey with the outline of their hand on the cave wall, but part of the message rings loud and clear across tens of millennia: At least 67,800 years ago, someone was here.

Really, really ancient mariners

The hand stencil on the wall of Liang Metanduno is, so far, the oldest evidence of our presence in Wallacea, the group of islands stretched between the continental shelves of Asia and Australia. Populating these islands is “widely considered to have involved the first planned, long-distance sea crossing undertaken by our species,” wrote Oktaviana and his colleagues.

Back when the long-lost artist laid their hand on the wall, sea levels were about 100 meters lower than they are today. Mainland Asia, Sumatra, and Borneo would have been high points in a single landmass, joined by wide swaths of lowlands that today lie beneath shallow ocean. The eastern shore of Borneo would have been a jumping-off point, beyond which lay several dozen kilometers of water and (out of view over the horizon) Sulawesi.

The first few people may have washed ashore on Sulawesi on some misadventure: lost fishermen or tsunami survivors, maybe. But at some point, people must have started making the crossing on purpose, which implies that they knew how to build rafts or boats, how to steer them, and that land awaited them on the other side.

Liang Metanduno pushes back the timing of that crossing by nearly 10,000 years. It also lends strong support to arguments that people arrived in Australia earlier than archaeologists had previously suspected. Archaeological evidence from a rock shelter called Madjedbebe, in northern Australia, suggests that people were living there by 65,000 years ago. But that evidence is still debated (such is the nature of archaeology), and some archaeologists argue that humans didn’t reach the continent until around 50,000 years ago.

“With the discovery of rock art dating to at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi, a large island on the most plausible colonization route to Australia, it is increasingly likely that the controversial date of 65,000 years for the initial peopling of Australia is correct,” Griffith University archaeologists Adam Brumm, a coauthor of the recent study, told Ars.

photo of an archaeologists studying a flashlight-lit cave wall adorned with ancient figures of animals in red — Archaeologists Shinatria Adhityatama studies a panel of ancient paintings in Liang Metanduno. Credit: Oktaviana et al. 2026

Archaeologists are still trying to work out exactly when, where, and how the first members of our species made the leap from the continent of Asia to the islands of Wallacea and, eventually, via several more open-water crossings, to Australia. Our picture of the process is pieced together from archaeological finds and models of ancient geography and sea levels.

“There’s been all sorts of work done on this (not by me), but often researchers consider the degree of intervisibility between islands, as well as other things like prevailing ocean currents and wind directions, changes in sea levels and how this affects the land area of islands and shorelines and so on,” Brumm said.

Most of those models suggest that people crossed the Makassar Strait from Borneo to Sulawesi, then island-hopped through what’s now Indonesia until they reached the western edge of New Guinea. At the time, lower sea levels would have left New Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand as one big land mass, so getting from New Guinea to what’s now Australia would actually have been the easy part.

A time capsule on the walls

There’s a sense of deep, deep time in Liang Metanduno. The cave wall is a palimpsest on which the ancient hand stencil is nearly covered by a brown-hued drawing of a chicken, which (based on its subject matter) must have been added sometime after 5,000 years ago, when a new wave of settlers brought domesticated chickens to the island. It seems almost newfangled against the ghostly faint outline of the Paleolithic hand.

A few centimeters away is another hand stencil, done in darker pigment and dating to around 21,500 years ago; it overlays a lighter stencil dating to around 60,900 years ago. Over tens of thousands of years, generations of people returned here with the same impulse. We have no way of knowing whether visitors 21,500 years ago, or 5,000 years ago might have seen a more vibrantly decorated cave wall than what’s preserved today—but we know that they decided to leave their mark on it.

And the people who visited the cave 21,500 years ago shared a sense of style with the artists who left their hands outlined on the wall nearly 40,000 years before them: both handprints have slightly pointed fingers, as if the artist either turned their fingertip or just touched-up the outline with some paint after making the stencil. It’s very similar to other hand stencils, dated to around 17,000 years ago, from elsewhere on Sulawesi, and it’s a style that seems unique to the island.

“We may conclude that this regionally unique variant of stencil art is much older than previously thought,” wrote Oktaviana and his colleagues.

photo of pointy-fingered hand stencils on a cave wall — These 17,000-year-old hand stencils from Liang Jarie Maros, in another area of Sulawesi, bear a striking resemblance to the much older ones in Liang Metanduno. Credit: OKtaviana et al. 2026

And Homo sapiens wasn’t the first hominin species to venture as far as Indonesia; at least 200,000 years earlier, Homo erectus made a similar journey, leaving behind fossils and stone tools to mark that they, too, were once here. On some of the smaller islands, isolated populations of Homo erectus started to evolve along their own paths, eventually leading to diminutive species like Homo floresiensis (the O.G. hobbits) on Flores and Homo luzonensis on Luzon. Homo floresiensis co-discoverer Richard Roberts has suggested that other isolated hominin species may have existed on other scattered islands.

Anthropologists haven’t found any fossil evidence of these species after 50,000 years ago, but if our species was in Indonesia by nearly 68,000 years ago, we would have been in time to meet our hominin cousins.

Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09968-y (About DOIs).

Kiona is a freelance science journalist and resident archaeology nerd at Ars Technica.

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Rocket Report: Chinese rockets fail twice in 12 hours; Rocket Lab reports setback

australia, Commercial space, Gilmour space, isar aerospace, launch, rocket report, Science, Space / Mike M. / January 23, 2026

Another partially reusable Chinese rocket, the Long March 12B, is nearing its first test flight.

An Archimedes engine for Rocket Lab’s Neutron rocket is test-fired at Stennis Space Center, Mississippi. Credit: Rocket Lab

Welcome to Edition 8.26 of the Rocket Report! The past week has been one of advancements and setbacks in the rocket business. NASA rolled the massive rocket for the Artemis II mission to its launch pad in Florida, while Chinese launchers suffered back-to-back failures within a span of approximately 12 hours. Rocket Lab’s march toward a debut of its new Neutron launch vehicle in the coming months may have stalled after a failure during a key qualification test. We cover all this and more in this week’s Rocket Report.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Australia invests in sovereign launch. Six months after its first orbital rocket cleared the launch tower for just 14 seconds before crashing back to Earth, Gilmour Space Technologies has secured 217 million Australian dollars ($148 million) in funding that CEO Adam Gilmour says finally gives Australia a fighting chance in the global space race, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. The funding round, led by the federal government’s National Reconstruction Fund Corporation and superannuation giant Hostplus with $75 million each, makes the Queensland company Australia’s newest unicorn—a fast-growth start-up valued at more than $1 billion—and one of the country’s most heavily backed private technology ventures.

Homegrown rocket… “We’re a rocket company that has never had access to the capital that our American competitors have,” Gilmour told the newspaper. “This is the first raise where I’ve actually raised a decent amount of capital compared to the rest of the world.” The investment reflects growing concern about Australia’s reliance on foreign launch providers—predominantly Elon Musk’s SpaceX—to put government, defense, and commercial satellites into orbit. With US launch queues stretching beyond two years and geopolitical tensions reshaping access to space infrastructure, Canberra has identified sovereign launch capability as a strategic priority. Gilmour’s first Eris rocket lifted off from the Bowen Orbital Spaceport in North Queensland on July 30 last year. It achieved 14 seconds of flight before falling back to the ground, a result Gilmour framed as a partial success in an industry where first launches routinely fail.

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Isar Aerospace postpones test flight. Isar Aerospace scrubbed a potential January 21 launch of its Spectrum rocket to address a technical fault, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Hours before the launch window was set to open, the German company said that it was addressing “an issue with a pressurization valve.” A valve issue was one of the factors that caused a Spectrum to crash moments after liftoff on Isar’s first test flight last year. “The teams are currently assessing the next possible launch opportunities and a new target date will be announced shortly,” the company wrote in a post on its website. The Spectrum rocket, designed to haul cargoes of up to a metric ton (2,200 pounds) to low-Earth orbit, is awaiting liftoff from Andøya Spaceport in Norway.

Geopolitics at play... The second launch of Isar’s Spectrum rocket comes at a time when Europe’s space industry looks to secure the continent’s sovereignty in spaceflight. European satellites are no longer able to launch on Russian rockets, and the continent’s leaders don’t have much of an appetite to turn to US rockets amid strained trans-Atlantic relations. Europe’s satellite industry is looking for more competition for the Ariane 6 and Vega C rockets developed by ArianeGroup and Avio, and Isar Aerospace appears to be best positioned to become a new entrant in the European launch market. “I’m well aware that it would be really good for us Europeans to get this one right,” said Daniel Metzler, Isar’s co-founder and CEO.

A potential buyer for Orbex? UK-based rocket builder Orbex has signed a letter of intent to sell its business to European space logistics startup The Exploration Company, European Spaceflight reports. Orbex was founded in 2015 and is developing a small launch vehicle called Prime. The company also began work on a larger medium-lift launch vehicle called Proxima in December 2024. On Wednesday, Orbex published a brief press release stating that a letter of intent had been signed and that negotiations had begun. The company added that all details about the transaction remain confidential at this stage.

Time’s up... A statement from Orbex CEO Phil Chambers suggests that the company’s financial position factored into its decision to pursue a buyer. “Our Series D fundraising could have led us in many directions,” said Chambers. “We believe this opportunity plays to the strengths of both businesses, and we look forward to sharing more when the time is right.” The Exploration Company, headquartered near Munich, Germany, is developing a reusable space capsule to ferry cargo to low-Earth orbit and a high-thrust reusable rocket engine. It is one of the most well-financed space startups in Europe. Orbex is one of five launch startups in Europe selected by the European Space Agency last year to compete in the European Launcher Challenge and receive funding from ESA member states. But the UK company’s financial standing is in question. Orbex’s Danish subsidiary is filing for bankruptcy, and its main UK entity is overdue in filing its 2024 financial accounts. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

A bad day for Chinese rockets. China suffered a pair of launch failures January 16, seeing the loss of a classified Shijian satellite and the failed first launch of the Ceres-2 rocket, Space News reports. The first of the two failures involved the attempted launch of a Shijian military satellite aboard a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang launch base in southwestern China. The Shijian 32 satellite was likely heading for a geostationary transfer orbit, but a failure of the Long March 3B’s third stage doomed the mission. The Long March 3B is one of China’s most-flown rockets, and this was the first failure of a Long March 3-series vehicle since 2020, ending a streak of 50 consecutive successful flights of the rocket.

And then… Less than 12 hours later, another Chinese rocket failed on its climb to orbit. This launch, using a Ceres-2 rocket, originated from the Jiuquan space center in northwestern China. It was the first flight of the Ceres-2, a larger variant of the light-class Ceres-1 rocket developed and operated by a Chinese commercial startup named Galactic Energy. Chinese officials did not disclose the payloads lost on the Ceres-2 rocket.

Neutron in neutral. Rocket Lab suffered a structural failure of the Neutron rocket’s Stage 1 tank during testing, setting back efforts to get to the inaugural flight for the partially reusable launcher, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. The mishap occurred during a hydrostatic pressure trial, the company said Wednesday. “There was no significant damage to the test structure or facilities,” Rocket Lab added. Rocket Lab last year pushed the first Neutron mission from 2025 to 2026, citing the volume of testing ahead. The US-based company said it is now analyzing what transpired to determine the impact on Neutron launch plans. Rocket Lab said it would provide an update during its next quarterly financials, due in a few weeks.

Where to go from here?… The Neutron rocket is designed to catapult Rocket Lab into more direct competition with legacy rocket companies like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. “The next Stage 1 tank is already in production, and Neutron’s development campaign continues,” the company said. Setbacks like this one are to be expected during the development of new rockets. Rocket Lab has publicized aggressive, or aspirational, launch schedules for the first Neutron rocket, so it’s likely the company will hang onto its projection of a debut launch in 2026, at least for now. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Falcon 9 launches NRO spysats. SpaceX executed a late night Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base on January 16, carrying an undisclosed number of intelligence-gathering satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission, NROL-105, hauled a payload of satellites heading to low-Earth orbit, which are believed to be Starshield, a government variant of the Starlink satellites. “Today’s mission is the twelfth overall launch of the NRO’s proliferated architecture and first of approximately a dozen NRO launches scheduled throughout 2026 consisting of proliferated and national security missions,” the NRO said in a post-launch statement.

Mysteries abound… A public accounting of the agency’s proliferated constellation suggests it now numbers nearly 200 satellites with the ability to rapidly image locations around the world. The NRO has dozens more satellites serving other functions. “Having hundreds of NRO satellites on orbit is critical to supporting our nation and its partners,” the agency said in a statement. “This growing constellation enhances mission resilience and capability through reduced revisit times, improved persistent coverage, and accelerated processing and delivery of critical data.” What was unusual about the January 16 mission is it may have only carried two satellites, well short of the 20-plus Starshield satellites launched on most previous Falcon 9 launches, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and expert tracker of global space launch activity.

Long March 12B hot-fired at Jiuquan. China’s main space contractor performed a static fire test of a new reusable Long March rocket Friday, paving the way for a test flight, Space News reports. The test-firing of the Long March 12B rocket’s first stage engines occurred on a launch pad at the Dongfeng Commercial Space Innovation Test Zone at Jiuquan spaceport in northwestern China. The mere existence of the Long March 12B rocket was not publicly known until recently. The new rocket was developed by a subsidiary of the state-owned China Aerospace Science Technology Corporation, with the capacity to carry a payload of 20 metric tons to low-Earth orbit in expendable mode. It’s unknown if the first Long March 12B test flight will include a booster landing attempt.

Another one… The Long March 12B has a reusable first stage with landing legs, similar to the recovery architecture of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The booster is designed to land downrange at a recovery zone in the Gobi Desert. The Long March 12B is the latest in a line of partially reusable Chinese rockets to reach the launch pad, following soon after the debut launches of the Long March 12A and Zhuque 3 rocket last month. Several more companies in China are working on their own reusable boosters. Of them all, the Long March 12B appears to be the closest to a clone of SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Like the Falcon 9, the Long March 12B will have nine kerosene-fueled first stage engines and a single kerosene-fueled upper stage engine. Chinese officials have not announced when the Long March 12B will launch.

Artemis II rolls to the launch pad. Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward last weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad, Ars reports. The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At the end of its nearly 10-day tour through cislunar space, the Orion capsule on top of the rocket will exceed 25,000 mph as it plunges into the atmosphere to bring its four-person crew back to Earth.

Key test ahead… “This is the start of a very long journey,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “We ended our last human exploration of the Moon on Apollo 17.” The Artemis II mission will set several notable human spaceflight records. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will travel farther from Earth than any human in history as they travel beyond the far side of the Moon. They won’t land. That distinction will fall to the next mission in line in NASA’s Artemis program. This will be the first time astronauts have flown on the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. The launch window opens February 6, but the exact date of Artemis II’s liftoff will be determined by the outcome of a critical fueling test of the SLS rocket scheduled for early February.

Blue Origin confirms rocket reuse plan. Blue Origin confirmed Thursday that the next launch of its New Glenn rocket will carry a large communications satellite into low-Earth orbit for AST SpaceMobile, Ars reports. The rocket will launch the next-generation Block 2 BlueBird satellite “no earlier than late February” from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. However, the update from Blue Origin appears to have buried the real news toward the end: “The mission follows the successful NG-2 mission, which included the landing of the ‘Never Tell Me The Odds’ booster. The same booster is being refurbished to power NG-3,” the company said.

Impressive strides… The second New Glenn mission launched on November 13, just 10 weeks ago. If the company makes the late-February target for the next mission—and Ars was told last week to expect the launch to slip into March—it will represent a remarkably short turnaround for an orbital booster. By way of comparison, SpaceX did not attempt to refly the first Falcon 9 booster it landed in December 2015. Instead, initial tests revealed that the vehicle’s interior had been somewhat torn up. It was scrapped and inspected closely so that engineers could learn from the wear and tear.

Next three launches

Jan. 25: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-20 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 15: 17 UTC

Jan. 26: Falcon 9 | GPS III SV09 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 04: 46 UTC

Jan. 26: Long March 7A | Unknown Payload | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 21: 00 UTC

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.

Rocket Report: Chinese rockets fail twice in 12 hours; Rocket Lab reports setback Read More »

Google plans secret AI military outpost on tiny island overrun by crabs

AI, AI and work, AI infrastructure, australia, Biz & IT, Christmas Island, Cloud Computing, crabs, datacenters, defense, Google, machine learning, Military, red crabs, SubCom, subsea cables / Kris Guyer / November 6, 2025

Christmas Island Shire President Steve Pereira told Reuters that the council is examining community impacts before approving construction. “There is support for it, providing this data center actually does put back into the community with infrastructure, employment, and adding economic value to the island,” Pereira said.

That’s great, but what about the crabs?

Christmas Island’s annual crab migration is a natural phenomenon that Sir David Attenborough reportedly once described as one of his greatest TV moments when he visited the site in 1990.

Every year, millions of crabs emerge from the forest and swarm across roads, streams, rocks, and beaches to reach the ocean, where each female can produce up to 100,000 eggs. The tiny baby crabs that survive take about nine days to march back inland to the safety of the plateau.

While Google is seeking environmental approvals for its subsea cables, the timing could prove delicate for Christmas Island’s most famous residents. According to Parks Australia, the island’s annual red crab migration has already begun for 2025, with a major spawning event expected in just a few weeks, around November 15–16.

During peak migration times, sections of roads close at short notice as crabs move between forest and sea, and the island has built special crab bridges over roads to protect the migrating masses.

Parks Australia notes that while the migration happens annually, few baby crabs survive the journey from sea to forest most years, as they’re often eaten by fish, manta rays, and whale sharks. The successful migrations that occur only once or twice per decade (when large numbers of babies actually survive) are critical for maintaining the island’s red crab population.

How Google’s facility might coexist with 100 million marching crustaceans remains to be seen. But judging by the size of the event, it seems clear that it’s the crab’s world, and we’re just living in it.

Google plans secret AI military outpost on tiny island overrun by crabs Read More »

Australia’s social media ban is “problematic,” but platforms will comply anyway

age checks, age estimation, age gate, australia, online child safety, Policy, social media ban / Kris Guyer / October 28, 2025

Social media platforms have agreed to comply with Australia’s social media ban for users under 16 years old, begrudgingly embracing the world’s most restrictive online child safety law.

On Tuesday, Meta, Snap, and TikTok confirmed to Australia’s parliament that they’ll start removing and deactivating more than a million underage accounts when the law’s enforcement begins on December 10, Reuters reported.

Firms risk fines of up to $32.5 million for failing to block underage users.

Age checks are expected to be spotty, however, and Australia is still “scrambling” to figure out “key issues around enforcement,” including detailing firms’ precise obligations, AFP reported.

An FAQ managed by Australia’s eSafety regulator noted that platforms will be expected to find the accounts of all users under 16.

Those users must be allowed to download their data easily before their account is removed.

Some platforms can otherwise allow users to simply deactivate and retain their data until they reach age 17. Meta and TikTok expect to go that route, but Australia’s regulator warned that “users should not rely on platforms to provide this option.”

Additionally, platforms must prepare to catch kids who skirt age gates, the regulator said, and must block anyone under 16 from opening a new account. Beyond that, they’re expected to prevent “workarounds” to “bypass restrictions,” such as kids using AI to fake IDs, deepfakes to trick face scans, or the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) to alter their location to basically anywhere else in the world with less restrictive child safety policies.

Kids discovered inappropriately accessing social media should be easy to report, too, Australia’s regulator said.

Australia’s social media ban is “problematic,” but platforms will comply anyway Read More »

The first people to set foot in Australia were fossil hunters

aboriginal australians, ancient people did stuff, Archaeology, australia, biological archaeology, Megafauna, megafaunal extinction, Science / Rejus Almole / October 23, 2025

I just think they’re neat

Europeans weren’t the first people to collect fossils in Australia.

Several species of short-faced kangaroos, like this one, once lived in Australia. Some stood two meters tall, while others were less than half a meter tall. Credit: By Ghedoghedo – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8398432

Australia’s First Peoples may or may not have hunted the continent’s megafauna to extinction, but they definitely collected fossils.

A team of archaeologists examined the fossilized leg bone of an extinct kangaroo and realized that instead of evidence of butchery, cut marks on the bone reveal an ancient attempt at fossil collecting. That leaves Australia with little evidence of First Peoples hunting or butchering the continent’s extinct megafauna—and reopens the question of whether humans were responsible for the die-off of that continent’s giant Ice Age marsupials.

Fossil hunting in the Ice Age

In the unsolved case of whether humans hunted Australia’s Ice Age megafauna to extinction, the key piece of evidence so far is a tibia (one of the bones of the lower leg) from an extinct short-faced kangaroo. Instead of hopping like their modern relatives, these extinct kangaroos walked on their hind legs, probably placing all their weight on the tips of single hoofed toes. This particular kangaroo wasn’t quite fully grown when it died, which happened sometime between 44,500 and 55,200 years ago, based on uranium-series dating of the thin layer of rock covering most of the fossils in Mammoth Cave (in what’s now Western Australia).

There’s a shallow, angled chunk cut out of the bone near one end. When archaeologists first noticed the cut in 1970 after carefully chipping away the crust of calcium carbonate that had formed over the bone, it looked like evidence that Pleistocene hunters had carved up the kangaroo to eat it. But in their recent paper, University of New South Wales archaeologist Michael Archer and his colleagues say that’s probably not what happened. Instead, they have a stranger idea: “We suggest here that the purpose of this effort may have been the retrieval of the fossils from the bone-rich late-Pleistocene deposit in Mammoth Cave after its discovery by First Peoples,” they wrote in their recent paper.

a photo of a fossil bone with a shallow chunk cut out of it — This close-up image shows the cut kangaroo bone and a micro-CT image of the surfaces of the cut. Credit: Archer et al. 2025

The world used to be so much weirder

Based on the available archaeological evidence, it looks like people first set foot on Australia sometime around 65,000 years ago. At the time, the continent was home to a bizarre array of giant marsupials, as well as flightless birds even bigger and scarier than today’s emus and cassowaries. For the next 20,000 years, Australia’s First Peoples shared the landscape with short-faced kangaroos; Zygomaturus trilobus, a hulking 500-kilogram marsupial that looked a little like a rhinoceros; and Diprotodon optatum, the largest marsupial that ever lived: a 3,000-kilogram behemoth that roamed in huge herds (picture a bear about the size of a bison with a woodchuck’s face).

These species died out sometime around 45,000 or 40,000 years ago; today, they live on in ancient rock art and stories, some of which seem to describe people interacting with now-extinct species.

Since they had shared the continent with humans for at least 20,000 years at that point, it doesn’t seem that the sudden arrival of humans caused an immediate mass extinction. But it’s possible that by hunting or even setting controlled fires, people may have put just enough strain on these megafauna species to make them vulnerable enough for the next climate upheaval to finish them off.

In some parts of the world, there’s direct evidence that Pleistocene people hunted or scavenged meat from the remains of now-extinct megafauna. Elsewhere, archaeologists are still debating whether humans, the inexorable end of the last Ice Age, or some combination of the two killed off the world’s great Ice Age giants. The interaction between people and their local ecosystems looked (and still looks) different everywhere, depending on culture, environment, and a host of other factors.

The jury is still out on what killed the megafauna in Australia because the evidence we need either hasn’t survived the intervening millennia or still lies buried somewhere, waiting to be found and studied. For decades, the one clear bit of evidence has seemed to be the Mammoth Cave short-faced kangaroo tibia. But Archer and his colleagues argue that even that isn’t a smoking gun.

An man in khakis and a dark blue shirt studies a cave wall. — An archaeologist examines a fossil deposit in the wall of Mammoth Cave, in Western Australia. 50,000 years ago, one of the earliest people on the continent may also have stood here contemplating the fossils. Credit: Archer et al. 2025

Evidence of rock collecting, not butchery

For one thing, the researchers argue that the kangaroo had been dead for a very long time when the cut was made. Nine long, thin cracks run along the length of the tibia, formed when the bone dried and shrank. And in the cut section, there’s a short crack running across the width of the bone—but it stops at either end when it meets the long cracks from the bone’s drying. That suggests the bone had already dried and shrunk, leaving those long cracks before the cut was made. It may have just been a very old bone, or it may have already begun to fossilize, but the meat would have been long gone, leaving behind a bone sticking out of the cave wall.

Since there’s no mark or dent on the opposite side of the bone from the cut (which would have happened if it were lying on the ground being butchered), it was probably sticking out of the fossil bed in the cave wall when someone came along and tried to cut it free. And since a crust of calcium carbonate had time to form over the cut (it covers most of the fossils in Mammoth Cave like a rocky burial shroud), that must have happened at least 44,000 years ago.

That leaves us with an interesting mental image: a member of one of Australia’s First Peoples, 45,000 years ago, exploring a cave filled with the bones of fantastical, long-dead animals. This ancient caver finds a bone sticking out from the cave wall and tries to hack the protruding end free—twice, from different angles—before giving up and leaving it in place.

People have always collected cool rocks

We can’t know for sure why this long-ago person wanted the bone in the first place. (Did it have a religious purpose? Might it have made a good tool? Was it just a cool souvenir?) We also don’t know why they gave up their attempt. But if Archer and his colleagues are right, the bone leaves Australia without any clear evidence that ancient people hunted—or even scavenged food from the remains of—extinct Pleistocene megafauna like short-faced kangaroos.

“This is not to say that it did not happen, just that there is now no hard evidence to support that it did,” Archer and his colleagues wrote in their recent paper. We don’t yet know exactly how Australia’s First Peoples interacted with these species.

But whether Archer and his colleagues are correct in their analysis of this particular kangaroo bone or not, humans around the world have been picking up fossils for at least tens of thousands of years. There’s evidence that people in Australia have collected and traded the fossils of extinct animals for pretty much as long as people have been in Australia, including everything from trilobites to Zygomaturus teeth and the jawbones of other extinct marsupials.

“What we can conclude,” Archer and his colleagues wrote, “is that the first people in Australia who demonstrated a keen interest in and collected fossils were First Peoples, probably thousands of years before Europeans set foot on that continent.”

Royal Society Open Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1098/rsos.250078 (About DOIs).

Kiona is a freelance science journalist and resident archaeology nerd at Ars Technica.

The first people to set foot in Australia were fossil hunters Read More »

Deloitte will refund Australian government for AI hallucination-filled report

AI, australia, chatgpt, deloitte, government, openai / Paul Patrick / October 6, 2025

The Australian Financial Review reports that Deloitte Australia will offer the Australian government a partial refund for a report that was littered with AI-hallucinated quotes and references to nonexistent research.

Deloitte’s “Targeted Compliance Framework Assurance Review” was finalized in July and published by Australia’s Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) in August (Internet Archive version of the original). The report, which cost Australian taxpayers nearly $440,000 AUD (about $290,000 USD), focuses on the technical framework the government uses to automate penalties under the country’s welfare system.

Shortly after the report was published, though, Sydney University Deputy Director of Health Law Chris Rudge noticed citations to multiple papers and publications that did not exist. That included multiple references to nonexistent reports by Lisa Burton Crawford, a real professor at the University of Sydney law school.

“It is concerning to see research attributed to me in this way,” Crawford told the AFR in August. “I would like to see an explanation from Deloitte as to how the citations were generated.”

“A small number of corrections”

Deloitte and the DEWR buried that explanation in an updated version of the original report published Friday “to address a small number of corrections to references and footnotes,” according to the DEWR website. On page 58 of that 273-page updated report, Deloitte added a reference to “a generative AI large language model (Azure OpenAI GPT-4o) based tool chain” that was used as part of the technical workstream to help “[assess] whether system code state can be mapped to business requirements and compliance needs.”

Deloitte will refund Australian government for AI hallucination-filled report Read More »

Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

AI, Artificial Intelligence, australia, openai, Policy / Paul Patrick / August 21, 2025

As banks around the world prepare to replace many thousands of workers with AI, Australia’s biggest bank is scrambling to rehire 45 workers after allegedly lying about chatbots besting staff by handling higher call volumes.

In a statement Thursday flagged by Bloomberg, Australia’s main financial services union, the Finance Sector Union (FSU), claimed a “massive win” for 45 union members whom the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) had replaced with an AI-powered “voice bot.”

The FSU noted that some of these workers had been with CBA for decades. Those workers in particular were shocked when CBA announced last month that their jobs had become redundant. At that time, CBA claimed that launching the chatbot supposedly “led to a reduction in call volumes” by 2,000 a week, FSU said.

But “this was an outright lie,” fired workers told FSU. Instead, call volumes had been increasing at the time they were dismissed, with CBA supposedly “scrambling”—offering staff overtime and redirecting management to join workers answering phones to keep up.

To uncover the truth, FSU escalated the dispute to a fair work tribunal, where the union accused CBA of failing to explain how workers’ roles were ruled redundant. The union also alleged that CBA was hiring for similar roles in India, Bloomberg noted, which made it appear that CBA had perhaps used the chatbot to cover up a shady pivot to outsource jobs.

While the dispute was being weighed, CBA admitted that “they didn’t properly consider that an increase in calls” happening while staff was being fired “would continue over a number of months,” FSU said.

“This error meant the roles were not redundant,” CBA confirmed at the tribunal.

Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says Read More »

The top fell off Australia’s first orbital-class rocket, delaying its launch

australia, Commercial space, eris rocket, Gilmour space, launch, Science, Space / Paul Patrick / May 16, 2025

This was unusual

Payload fairing problems have caused a number of rocket failures, usually because they don’t jettison during launch, or only partially deploy, leaving too much extra weight on the launch vehicle for it to reach orbit.

Gilmour said it is postponing the Eris launch campaign “to fully understand what happened and make any necessary updates.” The company was founded by two brothers—Adam and James Gilmour—in 2012, and has raised approximately $90 million from venture capital firms and government funds to get the first Eris rocket to the launch pad.

The astronauts on NASA’s Gemini 9A mission snapped this photo of a target vehicle they were supposed to dock with in orbit. But the rocket’s nose shroud only partially opened, inadvertently illustrating the method in which payload fairings are designed to jettison from their rockets in flight. Credit: NASA

The Eris rocket was aiming to become the first all-Australian launcher to reach orbit. Australia hosted a handful of satellite launches by US and British rockets more than 50 years ago.

Gilmour is headquartered in Gold Coast, Australia, about 600 miles south of the Eris launch pad near the coastal town of Bowen. In a statement, Gilmour said it has a replacement payload fairing in its factory in Gold Coast. The company will send it to the launch site and install it on the Eris rocket after a “full investigation” into the cause of the premature fairing deployment.

“While we’re disappointed by the delay, our team is already working on a solution and we expect to be back at the pad soon,” Gilmour said.

Officials did not say how long it might take to investigate the problem, correct it, and fit a new nose cone on the Eris rocket.

This setback follows more than a year of delays Gilmour blamed primarily on holdups in receiving regulatory approval for the launch from the Australian government.

Like many rocket companies have done before, Gilmour set modest expectations for the first test flight of Eris. While the rocket has everything needed to fly to low-Earth orbit, officials said they were looking for just 10 to 20 seconds of stable flight on the first launch, enough to gather data about the performance of the rocket and its unconventional hybrid propulsion system.

The top fell off Australia’s first orbital-class rocket, delaying its launch Read More »

Rocket Report: Australia says yes to the launch; Russia delivers for Iran

australia, china, dragon, european space agency, falcon 9, Gilmour space, h3 rocket, international space station, launch, rocket lab, rocket report, Science, soyuz, Space, spacex, starship, Themis / Paul Patrick / November 9, 2024

The world’s first wooden satellite arrived at the International Space Station this week.

A Falcon 9 booster fires its engines on SpaceX’s “tripod” test stand in McGregor, Texas. Credit: SpaceX

Welcome to Edition 7.19 of the Rocket Report! Okay, we get it. We received more submissions from our readers on Australia’s approval of a launch permit for Gilmour Space than we’ve received on any other news story in recent memory. Thank you for your submissions as global rocket activity continues apace. We’ll cover Gilmour in more detail as they get closer to launch. There will be no Rocket Report next week as Eric and I join the rest of the Ars team for our 2024 Technicon in New York.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Gilmour Space has a permit to fly. Gilmour Space Technologies has been granted a permit to launch its 82-foot-tall (25-meter) orbital rocket from a spaceport in Queensland, Australia. The space company, founded in 2012, had initially planned to lift off in March but was unable to do so without approval from the Australian Space Agency, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. The government approved Gilmour’s launch permit Monday, although the company is still weeks away from flying its three-stage Eris rocket.

A first for Australia … Australia hosted a handful of satellite launches with US and British rockets from 1967 through 1971, but Gilmour’s Eris rocket would become the first all-Australian launch vehicle to reach orbit. The Eris rocket is capable of delivering about 670 pounds (305 kilograms) of payload mass into a Sun-synchronous orbit. Eris will be powered by hybrid rocket engines burning a solid fuel mixed with a liquid oxidizer, making it unique among orbital-class rockets. Gilmour completed a wet dress rehearsal, or practice countdown, with the Eris rocket on the launch pad in Queensland in September. The launch permit becomes active after 30 days, or the first week of December. “We do think we’ve got a good chance of launching at the end of the 30-day period, and we’re going to give it a red hot go,” said Adam Gilmour, the company’s co-founder and CEO. (submitted by Marzipan, mryall, ZygP, Ken the Bin, Spencer Willis, MarkW98, and EllPeaTea)

North Korea tests new missile. North Korea apparently completed a successful test of its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile on October 31, lofting it nearly 4,800 miles (7,700 kilometers) into space before the projectile fell back to Earth, Ars reports. This solid-fueled, multi-stage missile, named the Hwasong-19, is a new tool in North Korea’s increasingly sophisticated arsenal of weapons. It has enough range—perhaps as much as 9,320 miles (15,000 kilometers), according to Japan’s government—to strike targets anywhere in the United States. It also happens to be one of the largest ICBMs in the world, rivaling the missiles fielded by the world’s more established nuclear powers.

Quid pro quo? … The Hwasong-19 missile test comes as North Korea deploys some 10,000 troops inside Russia to support the country’s war against Ukraine. The budding partnership between Russia and North Korea has evolved for several years. Russian President Vladimir Putin has met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on multiple occasions, most recently in Pyongyang in June. This has fueled speculation about what Russia is offering North Korea in exchange for the troops deployed on Russian soil. US and South Korean officials have some thoughts. They said North Korea is likely to ask for technology transfers in diverse areas related to tactical nuclear weapons, ICBMs, and reconnaissance satellites.

Sign Me Up!

Virgin Galactic is on the hunt for cash. Virgin Galactic is proposing to raise $300 million in additional capital to accelerate production of suborbital spaceplanes and a mothership aircraft the company says can fuel its long-term growth, Space News reports. The company, founded by billionaire Richard Branson, suspended operations of its VSS Unity suborbital spaceplane earlier this year. VSS Unity hit a monthly flight cadence carrying small groups of space tourists and researchers to the edge of space, but it just wasn’t profitable. Now, Virgin Galactic is developing larger Delta-class spaceplanes it says will be easier and cheaper to turn around between flights.

All-in with Delta … Michael Colglazier, Virgin Galactic’s CEO, announced the company’s appetite for fundraising in a quarterly earnings call with investment analysts Wednesday. He said manufacturing of components for Virgin Galactic’s first two Delta-class ships, which the company says it can fund with existing cash, is proceeding on schedule at a factory in Arizona. Virgin Galactic previously said it would use revenue from paying passengers on its first two Delta-class ships to pay for development of future vehicles. Instead, Virgin Galactic now says it wants to raise money to speed up work on the third and fourth Delta-class vehicles, along with a second airplane mothership to carry the spaceplanes aloft before they release and fire into space. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

ESA breaks its silence on Themis. The European Space Agency has provided a rare update on the progress of its Themis reusable booster demonstrator project, European Spaceflight reports. ESA is developing the Themis test vehicle for atmospheric flights to fine-tune technologies for a future European reusable rocket capable of vertical takeoffs and vertical landings. Themis started out as a project led by CNES, the French space agency, in 2018. ESA member states signed up to help fund the project in 2019, and the agency awarded ArianeGroup a contract to move forward with Themis in 2020. At the time, the first low-altitude hop test was expected to take place in 2022.

Some slow progress … Now, the first low-altitude hop is scheduled for 2025 from Esrange Space Centre in Sweden, a three-year delay. This week, ESA said engineers have completed testing of the Themis vehicle’s main systems, and assembly of the demonstrator is underway in France. A single methane-fueled Prometheus engine, also developed by ArianeGroup, has been installed on the rocket. Teams are currently adding avionics, computers, electrical systems, and cable harnesses. Themis’ stainless steel propellant tanks have been manufactured, tested, and cleaned and are now ready to be installed on the Themis demonstrator. Then, the rocket will travel by road from France to the test site in Sweden for its initial low-altitude hops. After those flights are complete, officials plan to add two more Prometheus engines to the rocket and ship it to French Guiana for high-altitude test flights. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

SpaceX will give the ISS a boost. A Cargo Dragon spacecraft docked to the International Space Station on Tuesday morning, less than a day after lifting off from Florida. As space missions go, this one is fairly routine, ferrying about 6,000 pounds (2,700 kilograms) of cargo and science experiments to the space station. One thing that’s different about this mission is that it delivered to the station a tiny 2 lb (900 g) satellite named LignoSat, the first spacecraft made of wood, for later release outside the research complex. There is one more characteristic of this flight that may prove significant for NASA and the future of the space station, Ars reports. As early as Friday, NASA and SpaceX have scheduled a “reboost and attitude control demonstration,” during which the Dragon spacecraft will use some of the thrusters at the base of the capsule. This is the first time the Dragon spacecraft will be used to move the space station.

Dragon’s breath … Dragon will fire a subset of its 16 Draco thrusters, each with about 90 pounds of thrust, for approximately 12.5 minutes to make a slight adjustment to the orbital trajectory of the roughly 450-ton space station. SpaceX and NASA engineers will analyze the results from the demonstration to determine if Dragon could be used for future space station reboost opportunities. The data will also inform the design of the US Deorbit Vehicle, which SpaceX is developing to perform the maneuvers required to bring the space station back to Earth for a controlled, destructive reentry in the early 2030s. For NASA, demonstrating Dragon’s ability to move the space station will be another step toward breaking free of reliance on Russia, which is currently responsible for providing propulsion to maneuver the orbiting outpost. Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus supply ship also previously demonstrated a reboost capability. (submitted by Ken the Bin and N35t0r)

Russia launches Soyuz in service of Iran. Russia launched a Soyuz rocket Monday carrying two satellites designed to monitor the space weather around Earth and 53 small satellites, including two Iranian ones, Reuters reports. The primary payloads aboard the Soyuz-2.1b rocket were two Ionosfera-M satellites to probe the ionosphere, an outer layer of the atmosphere near the edge of space. Solar activity can alter conditions in the ionosphere, impacting communications and navigation. The two Iranian satellites on this mission were named Kowsar and Hodhod. They will collect high-resolution reconnaissance imagery and support communications for Iran.

A distant third … This was only the 13th orbital launch by Russia this year, trailing far behind the United States and China. We know of two more Soyuz flights planned for later this month, but no more, barring a surprise military launch (which is possible). The projected launch rate puts Russia on pace for its quietest year of launch activity since 1961, the year Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space. A major reason for this decline in launches is the decisions of Western governments and companies to move their payloads off of Russian rockets after the invasion of Ukraine. For example, OneWeb stopped launching on Soyuz in 2022, and the European Space Agency suspended its partnership with Russia to launch Soyuz rockets from French Guiana. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

H3 deploys Japanese national security satellite. Japan launched a defense satellite Monday aimed at speedier military operations and communication on an H3 rocket and successfully placed it into orbit, the Associated Press reports. The Kirameki 3 satellite will use high-speed X-band communication to support Japan’s defense ministry with information and data sharing, and command and control services. The satellite will serve Japanese land, air, and naval forces from its perch in geostationary orbit alongside two other Kirameki communications satellites.

Gaining trust … The H3 is Japan’s new flagship rocket, developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) and funded by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The launch of Kirameki 3 marked the third consecutive successful launch of the H3 rocket, following a debut flight in March 2023 that failed to reach orbit. This was the first time Japan’s defense ministry put one of its satellites on the H3 rocket. The first two Kirameki satellites launched on a European Ariane 5 and a Japanese H-IIA rocket, which the H3 will replace. (submitted by Ken the Bin, tsunam, and EllPeaTea)

Rocket Lab enters the race for military contracts. Rocket Lab is aiming to chip away at SpaceX’s dominance in military space launch, confirming its bid to compete for Pentagon contracts with its new medium-lift rocket, Neutron, Space News reports. Last month, the Space Force released a request for proposals from launch companies seeking to join the military’s roster of launch providers in the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program. The Space Force will accept bids for launch providers to “on-ramp” to the NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 contract, which doles out task orders to launch companies for individual missions. In order to win a task order, a launch provider must be on the Phase 3 Lane 1 contract. Currently, SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Blue Origin are the only rocket companies eligible. SpaceX won all of the first round of Lane 1 task orders last month.

Joining the club … The Space Force is accepting additional risk for Lane 1 missions, which largely comprise repeat launches deploying a constellation of missile-tracking and data-relay satellites for the Space Development Agency. A separate class of heavy-lift missions, known as Lane 2, will require rockets to undergo a thorough certification by the Space Force to ensure their reliability. In order for a launch company to join the Lane 1 roster, the Space Force requires bidders to be ready for a first launch by December 2025. Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, said he thinks the Neutron rocket will be ready for its first launch by then. Other new medium-lift rockets, such as Firefly Aerospace’s MLV and Relativity’s Terran-R, almost certainly won’t be ready to launch by the end of next year, leaving Rocket Lab as the only company that will potentially join incumbents SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Next Starship flight is just around the corner. Less than a month has passed since the historic fifth flight of SpaceX’s Starship, during which the company caught the booster with mechanical arms back at the launch pad in Texas. Now, another test flight could come as soon as November 18, Ars reports. The improbable but successful recovery of the Starship first stage with “chopsticks” last month, and the on-target splashdown of the Starship upper stage halfway around the world, allowed SpaceX to avoid an anomaly investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration. Thus, the company was able to press ahead on a sixth test flight if it flew a similar profile. And that’s what SpaceX plans to do, albeit with some notable additions to the flight plan.

Around the edges … Perhaps the most significant change to the profile for Flight 6 will be an attempt to reignite a Raptor engine on Starship while it is in space. SpaceX tried to do this on a test flight in March but aborted the burn because the ship’s rolling motion exceeded limits. A successful demonstration of a Raptor engine relight could pave the way for SpaceX to launch Starship into a higher stable orbit around Earth on future test flights. This is required for SpaceX to begin using Starship to launch Starlink Internet satellites and perform in-orbit refueling experiments with two ships docked together. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

China’s version of Starship. China has updated the design of its next-generation heavy-lift rocket, the Long March 9, and it looks almost exactly like a clone of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, Ars reports. The Long March 9 started out as a conventional-looking expendable rocket, then morphed into a launcher with a reusable first stage. Now, the rocket will have a reusable booster and upper stage. The booster will have 30 methane-fueled engines, similar to the number of engines on SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster. The upper stage looks remarkably like Starship, with flaps in similar locations. China intends to fly this vehicle for the first time in 2033, nearly a decade from now.

A vehicle for the Moon … The reusable Long March 9 is intended to unlock robust lunar operations for China, similar to the way Starship, and to some extent Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander, promises to support sustained astronaut stays on the Moon’s surface. China says it plans to land its astronauts on the Moon by 2030, initially using a more conventional architecture with an expendable rocket named the Long March 10, and a lander reminiscent of NASA’s Apollo lunar lander. These will allow Chinese astronauts to remain on the Moon for a matter of days. With Long March 9, China could deliver massive loads of cargo and life support resources to sustain astronauts for much longer stays.

Ta-ta to the tripod. The large three-legged vertical test stand at SpaceX’s engine test site in McGregor, Texas, is being decommissioned, NASA Spaceflight reports. Cranes have started removing propellant tanks from the test stand, nicknamed the tripod, towering above the Central Texas prairie. McGregor is home to SpaceX’s propulsion test team and has 16 test cells to support firings of Merlin, Raptor, and Draco engines multiple times per day for the Falcon 9 rocket, Starship, and Dragon spacecraft.

Some history … The tripod might have been one of SpaceX’s most important assets in the company’s early years. It was built by Beal Aerospace for liquid-fueled rocket engine tests in the late 1990s. Beal Aerospace folded, and SpaceX took over the site in 2003. After some modifications, SpaceX installed the first qualification version of its Falcon 9 rocket on the tripod for a series of nine-engine test-firings leading up to the rocket’s inaugural flight in 2010. SpaceX test-fired numerous new Falcon 9 boosters on the tripod before shipping them to launch sites in Florida or California. Most recently, the tripod was used for testing of Raptor engines destined to fly on Starship and the Super Heavy booster.

Next three launches

Nov. 9: Long March 2C | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 03: 40 UTC

Nov. 9: Falcon 9 | Starlink 9-10 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 06: 14 UTC

Nov. 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-69 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 21: 28 UTC

Rocket Report: Australia says yes to the launch; Russia delivers for Iran Read More »

X fails to avoid Australia child safety fine by arguing Twitter doesn’t exist

australia, child sexual abuse materials, csam, elon musk, online child safety, Online safety, Policy, Twitter, X, x corp / Rejus Almole / October 5, 2024

“I cannot accept this evidence without a much better explanation of Mr. Bogatz’s path of reasoning,” Wheelahan wrote.

Wheelahan emphasized that the Nevada merger law specifically stipulated that “all debts, liabilities, obligations and duties of the Company shall thenceforth remain with or be attached to, as the case may be, the Acquiror and may be enforced against it to the same extent as if it had incurred or contracted all such debts, liabilities, obligations, and duties.” And Bogatz’s testimony failed to “grapple with the significance” of this, Wheelahan said.

Overall, Wheelahan considered Bogatz’s testimony on X’s merger-acquired liabilities “strained,” while deeming the government’s US merger law expert Alexander Pyle to be “honest and ready to make appropriate concessions,” even while some of his testimony was “not of assistance.”

Luckily, it seemed that Wheelahan had no trouble drawing his own conclusion after analyzing Nevada’s merger law.

“I find that a Nevada court would likely hold that the word ‘liabilities'” in the merger law “is broad enough on its proper construction under Nevada law to encompass non-pecuniary liabilities, such as the obligation to respond to the reporting notice,” Wheelahan wrote. “X Corp has therefore failed to show that it was not required to respond to the reporting notice.”

Because X “failed on all its claims,” the social media company must cover costs from the appeal, and X’s costs in fighting the initial fine will seemingly only increase from here.

Fighting fine likely to more than double X costs

In a press release celebrating the ruling, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant criticized X’s attempt to use the merger to avoid complying with Australia’s Online Safety Act.

X fails to avoid Australia child safety fine by arguing Twitter doesn’t exist Read More »

“Fascists”: Elon Musk responds to proposed fines for disinformation on X

australia, disinformation, elon musk, misinformation, Policy, syndication, Twitter, X / Mike M. / September 14, 2024

Being responsible is so hard —

“Elon Musk’s had more positions on free speech than the Kama Sutra,” says lawmaker.

Nic Fildes, Financial Times – Sep 13, 2024 1: 32 pm UTC

Getty Images | Dan Kitwood

Elon Musk has lambasted Australia’s government as “fascists” over proposed laws that could levy substantial fines on social media companies if they fail to comply with rules to combat the spread of disinformation and online scams.

The billionaire owner of social media site X posted the word “fascists” on Friday in response to the bill, which would strengthen the Australian media regulator’s ability to hold companies responsible for the content on their platforms and levy potential fines of up to 5 percent of global revenue. The bill, which was proposed this week, has yet to be passed.

Musk’s comments drew rebukes from senior Australian politicians, with Stephen Jones, Australia’s finance minister, telling national broadcaster ABC that it was “crackpot stuff” and the legislation was a matter of sovereignty.

Bill Shorten, the former leader of the Labor Party and a cabinet minister, accused the billionaire of only championing free speech when it was in his commercial interests. “Elon Musk’s had more positions on free speech than the Kama Sutra,” Shorten said in an interview with Australian radio.

The exchange marks the second time that Musk has confronted Australia over technology regulation.

In May, he accused the country’s eSafety Commissioner of censorship after the government agency took X to court in an effort to force it to remove graphic videos of a stabbing attack in Sydney. A court later denied the eSafety Commissioner’s application.

Musk has also been embroiled in a bitter dispute with authorities in Brazil, where the Supreme Court ruled last month that X should be blocked over its failure to remove or suspend certain accounts accused of spreading misinformation and hateful content.

Australia has been at the forefront of efforts to regulate the technology sector, pitting it against some of the world’s largest social media companies.

This week, the government pledged to introduce a minimum age limit for social media use to tackle “screen addiction” among young people.

In March, Canberra threatened to take action against Meta after the owner of Facebook and Instagram said it would withdraw from a world-first deal to pay media companies to link to news stories.

The government also introduced new data privacy measures to parliament on Thursday that would impose hefty fines and potential jail terms of up to seven years for people found guilty of “doxxing” individuals or groups.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government had pledged to outlaw doxxing—the publication of personal details online for malicious purposes—this year after the details of a private WhatsApp group containing hundreds of Jewish Australians were published online.

Australia is one of the first countries to pursue laws outlawing doxxing. It is also expected to introduce a tranche of laws in the coming months to regulate how personal data can be used by artificial intelligence.

“These reforms give more teeth to the regulation,” said Monique Azzopardi at law firm Clayton Utz.

“Fascists”: Elon Musk responds to proposed fines for disinformation on X Read More »

AI trains on kids’ photos even when parents use strict privacy settings

AI, ai deepfakes, AI training, Artificial Intelligence, australia, child online safety, children's online privacy, generative ai, Human rights, image generators, large language models, Policy, youtube / Kris Guyer / July 2, 2024

“Outrageous” —

Even unlisted YouTube videos are used to train AI, watchdog warns.

Ashley Belanger – Jul 2, 2024 7: 37 pm UTC

Human Rights Watch (HRW) continues to reveal how photos of real children casually posted online years ago are being used to train AI models powering image generators—even when platforms prohibit scraping and families use strict privacy settings.

Last month, HRW researcher Hye Jung Han found 170 photos of Brazilian kids that were linked in LAION-5B, a popular AI dataset built from Common Crawl snapshots of the public web. Now, she has released a second report, flagging 190 photos of children from all of Australia’s states and territories, including indigenous children who may be particularly vulnerable to harms.

These photos are linked in the dataset “without the knowledge or consent of the children or their families.” They span the entirety of childhood, making it possible for AI image generators to generate realistic deepfakes of real Australian children, Han’s report said. Perhaps even more concerning, the URLs in the dataset sometimes reveal identifying information about children, including their names and locations where photos were shot, making it easy to track down children whose images might not otherwise be discoverable online.

That puts children in danger of privacy and safety risks, Han said, and some parents thinking they’ve protected their kids’ privacy online may not realize that these risks exist.

From a single link to one photo that showed “two boys, ages 3 and 4, grinning from ear to ear as they hold paintbrushes in front of a colorful mural,” Han could trace “both children’s full names and ages, and the name of the preschool they attend in Perth, in Western Australia.” And perhaps most disturbingly, “information about these children does not appear to exist anywhere else on the Internet”—suggesting that families were particularly cautious in shielding these boys’ identities online.

Stricter privacy settings were used in another image that Han found linked in the dataset. The photo showed “a close-up of two boys making funny faces, captured from a video posted on YouTube of teenagers celebrating” during the week after their final exams, Han reported. Whoever posted that YouTube video adjusted privacy settings so that it would be “unlisted” and would not appear in searches.

Only someone with a link to the video was supposed to have access, but that didn’t stop Common Crawl from archiving the image, nor did YouTube policies prohibiting AI scraping or harvesting of identifying information.

Reached for comment, YouTube’s spokesperson, Jack Malon, told Ars that YouTube has “been clear that the unauthorized scraping of YouTube content is a violation of our Terms of Service, and we continue to take action against this type of abuse.” But Han worries that even if YouTube did join efforts to remove images of children from the dataset, the damage has been done, since AI tools have already trained on them. That’s why—even more than parents need tech companies to up their game blocking AI training—kids need regulators to intervene and stop training before it happens, Han’s report said.

Han’s report comes a month before Australia is expected to release a reformed draft of the country’s Privacy Act. Those reforms include a draft of Australia’s first child data protection law, known as the Children’s Online Privacy Code, but Han told Ars that even people involved in long-running discussions about reforms aren’t “actually sure how much the government is going to announce in August.”

“Children in Australia are waiting with bated breath to see if the government will adopt protections for them,” Han said, emphasizing in her report that “children should not have to live in fear that their photos might be stolen and weaponized against them.”

AI uniquely harms Australian kids

To hunt down the photos of Australian kids, Han “reviewed fewer than 0.0001 percent of the 5.85 billion images and captions contained in the data set.” Because her sample was so small, Han expects that her findings represent a significant undercount of how many children could be impacted by the AI scraping.

“It’s astonishing that out of a random sample size of about 5,000 photos, I immediately fell into 190 photos of Australian children,” Han told Ars. “You would expect that there would be more photos of cats than there are personal photos of children,” since LAION-5B is a “reflection of the entire Internet.”

LAION is working with HRW to remove links to all the images flagged, but cleaning up the dataset does not seem to be a fast process. Han told Ars that based on her most recent exchange with the German nonprofit, LAION had not yet removed links to photos of Brazilian kids that she reported a month ago.

LAION declined Ars’ request for comment.

In June, LAION’s spokesperson, Nathan Tyler, told Ars that, “as a nonprofit, volunteer organization,” LAION is committed to doing its part to help with the “larger and very concerning issue” of misuse of children’s data online. But removing links from the LAION-5B dataset does not remove the images online, Tyler noted, where they can still be referenced and used in other AI datasets, particularly those relying on Common Crawl. And Han pointed out that removing the links from the dataset doesn’t change AI models that have already trained on them.

“Current AI models cannot forget data they were trained on, even if the data was later removed from the training data set,” Han’s report said.

Kids whose images are used to train AI models are exposed to a variety of harms, Han reported, including a risk that image generators could more convincingly create harmful or explicit deepfakes. In Australia last month, “about 50 girls from Melbourne reported that photos from their social media profiles were taken and manipulated using AI to create sexually explicit deepfakes of them, which were then circulated online,” Han reported.

For First Nations children—”including those identified in captions as being from the Anangu, Arrernte, Pitjantjatjara, Pintupi, Tiwi, and Warlpiri peoples”—the inclusion of links to photos threatens unique harms. Because culturally, First Nations peoples “restrict the reproduction of photos of deceased people during periods of mourning,” Han said the AI training could perpetuate harms by making it harder to control when images are reproduced.

Once an AI model trains on the images, there are other obvious privacy risks, including a concern that AI models are “notorious for leaking private information,” Han said. Guardrails added to image generators do not always prevent these leaks, with some tools “repeatedly broken,” Han reported.

LAION recommends that, if troubled by the privacy risks, parents remove images of kids online as the most effective way to prevent abuse. But Han told Ars that’s “not just unrealistic, but frankly, outrageous.”

“The answer is not to call for children and parents to remove wonderful photos of kids online,” Han said. “The call should be [for] some sort of legal protections for these photos, so that kids don’t have to always wonder if their selfie is going to be abused.”

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