Tesla driver who blamed crash on autopilot pressed accelerator 100%, NTSB finds

Tesla driver who blamed crash on autopilot pressed accelerator 100%, NTSB finds

fivenewscrypto    juillet 17, 2026   

On Wednesday, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released preliminary findings verifying Elon Musk’s and Tesla’s claims that a driver involved in a fatal Texas crash that killed a grandmother overrode Full Self Driving in the moments ahead of impact.

Last month, 44-year-old Michael Butler told police that the autopilot feature was engaged at the time of the crash. On X, Musk disputed the claim, writing that Butler must have overridden the feature because “FSD drives slowly through neighborhood streets, and this was a high-speed crash!” Moving to back Musk’s claim, Tesla’s vice president of AI software, Ashok Elluswamy, said that internal data showed “the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100 percent of the accel pedal in this residential area.”

NTSB’s preliminary report, which does not yet determine what caused the crash, confirmed Tesla’s claims. Its probe found that FSD was engaged at the time of the crash, but electronic data showed “the driver manually overrode FSD (Supervised) by pressing the accelerator pedal to 100 percent.”

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Move over, GPS: Navigation satellites in low-Earth orbit are making a comeback

Move over, GPS: Navigation satellites in low-Earth orbit are making a comeback

fivenewscrypto    juillet 17, 2026   

New navigation satellites in low-Earth orbit could provide 100 times stronger signal strength compared to GPS and other global navigation satellite systems operating from higher orbital altitudes—enabling greater location accuracy within dense cities, under thick foliage, and even inside buildings. Such signals would also likely prove more resilient to interference at a time when commercial flights, maritime shipping, and even various smartphone apps face increasingly widespread disruption from GPS jamming.

That vision may start to take shape when the first six production satellites of California-based Xona Space Systems are scheduled to launch in October 2026, with early service starting in 2027. Once the full constellation of 258 Pulsar satellites has been launched in the following years, Xona claims that customers will be able to accurately pinpoint their locations anywhere on Earth to within several centimeters.

“That added power means that we can get into that indoor environment that GPS can't get to today,” Adrien Perkins, co-founder and VP of engineering at Xona Space Systems, told Ars. “Our higher power allows you to get into those jamming environments a lot further than you would with GPS by itself.”

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Hundreds rally at Bethesda HQ to protest Xbox layoffs, and Ars was there

Hundreds rally at Bethesda HQ to protest Xbox layoffs, and Ars was there

fivenewscrypto    juillet 17, 2026   

ROCKVILLE, Maryland—Hundreds of Bethesda Game Studios and Zenimax Online Studios employees and their supporters braved nearly 100° F temperatures to protest sweeping layoffs across Xbox during a lunchtime rally in front of parent company Zenimax's headquarters today. The rally was one of five today organized by Zenimax Workers United and its parent union, the Communication Workers of America, at offices across Texas, California, and Montreal.

Attendees held up signs with messages like "Layoffs... layoffs never change" and "Our players deserve better" as union organizers and employees rallied the crowd with speeches and songs. The overwhelming message was one of solidarity and a willingness to push back against job cuts they say have decimated their development and quality assurance teams.

"It's about us building our movement and making sure that we get seen and we're visible," Bethesda technical producer and union volunteer organizer Nathan Hahn told Ars. "Because we want to make sure that we're not okay with these layoffs and that Xbox knows."

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Buzz Aldrin sells famous felt-tip pen that helped launch Apollo from the Moon

Buzz Aldrin sells famous felt-tip pen that helped launch Apollo from the Moon

fivenewscrypto    juillet 16, 2026   

A dried-out felt-tip marker and a snapped-off piece of molded black plastic sold for $857,600 at a Sotheby's auction on Wednesday.

What otherwise might have been worthless bits of trash commanded the highest bids due to where the two items were 57 years ago—lifting off aboard NASA's Apollo 11 spacecraft on humanity's first mission to land astronauts on the Moon. More than flown odds and ends, one was the problem that almost stranded Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface, and the other was the simple solution to saving the mission.

"Houston, Tranquility. Do you have a way of showing the configuration of the engine arm circuit breaker?" radioed Aldrin to Mission Control after realizing he or Armstrong had inadvertently broken off the top of the circuit breaker switch that would enable their ascent engine to ignite, beginning their trip back to Earth. "The reason I'm asking is because the end of it appears to be broken off. I think we can push it back in again. I'm not sure we could pull it out if we pushed it in, though."

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Sheetz is quitting VMware, migrating 11,000 virtual machines

Sheetz is quitting VMware, migrating 11,000 virtual machines

fivenewscrypto    juillet 16, 2026   

Sheetz, a US convenience store chain, is moving its 838 locations off VMware.

Sheetz has used VMware virtualization across two Dell R440/R450-series servers at each of its locations since 2019. Now it’s migrating 12 to 14 virtual machines (VMs) in each of its stores from VMware vSphere to StorMagic’s SvHCI, “with an additional two VMs to be replaced over the coming months to transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11,” Scott Robertson, infrastructure team manager at Sheetz, told Ars Technica via email. Ultimately, Sheetz will move about 11,000 VMs from Broadcom's virtualization platform. Sheetz is still running the original Dell server hardware.

So far, Sheetz has finished migrating more than 600 stores, averaging 200 per month, according to a company announcement today. Sheetz should be finished with the migration in four months, the announcement said.

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Judge: Trump can’t deport researchers just for working in content moderation

Judge: Trump can’t deport researchers just for working in content moderation

fivenewscrypto    juillet 16, 2026   

This week, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) won a key battle in its fight to reverse a visa-restriction policy that the Trump administration had used to attempt to revoke green cards and deport non-US citizens who work on misinformation, disinformation, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.

In an opinion published Tuesday, US District Judge James Boasberg granted a preliminary injunction blocking the State Department from enforcing the policy until the CITR’s lawsuit is resolved.

On its face, the policy does not require visa denials or deportations. Instead, it authorizes immigration investigations into individuals suspected of helping foreign adversaries attempt to manipulate public opinion by suppressing US speech.

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OpenAI's first branded hardware is... a light-up keyboard?

OpenAI's first branded hardware is... a light-up keyboard?

fivenewscrypto    juillet 16, 2026   

As rumors continue to swirl about OpenAI's work on a personalized smart speaker and other hardware, the company is today rolling out its first branded device. The $230 Codex Micro is a specialized, RGB-lit mini-keyboard designed to let users monitor and quickly interact with multiple Codex agents with a glance and a few clicks.

The device is described as a "limited-run collaboration" with Work Louder, which already sells a very similar-looking Creator Micro line of customizable square keyboards targeted at creative professionals. The Codex Micro differentiates itself from those mainly through six frosted keys in the top two rows, which offer color-coded live feedback on up to six Codex threads, even when they are not in focus on-screen.

Open the OpenAI box for AI assistance. Credit: OpenAI / Work Louder

Ideally, those colored keys will cycle from white when a thread is idle to blue when Codex is thinking to green when a task is complete. But the keys can also flash amber when Codex requires feedback or a decision from a human operator and red when a thread encounters an error, letting users know at a glance which of their Codex tasks needs immediate attention. A quick tap on the lit-up button brings up the applicable Codex window on-screen.

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