Cards Against Humanity lawsuit forced SpaceX to vacate land on US/Mexico border

Cards Against Humanity lawsuit forced SpaceX to vacate land on US/Mexico border

fivenewscrypto    octobre 22, 2025   

A year after suing SpaceX for “invading” a plot of land on the US/Mexico border, Cards Against Humanity says it has obtained a settlement and will provide supporters with a new pack of cards about Elon Musk.

The party-game company bought the land in 2017 in an attempt to stymie President Trump’s wall-building project, but alleged that SpaceX illegally took over the land and filled it with construction equipment and materials. A September 2024 lawsuit filed against SpaceX in Cameron County District Court in Texas sought up to $15 million to cover the cost of restoring the property and other damages.

Cards Against Humanity, which bought the property with donations from supporters, told Ars today that “we’ve been in negotiations with SpaceX for much of the last year. We held out for the best settlement we could get—almost until the trial was supposed to start—and unfortunately part of that negotiation was that we’re not allowed to discuss specific settlement terms. They did admit to trespassing during the discovery phase, which was very validating.”

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M5 iPad Pro tested: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

M5 iPad Pro tested: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

fivenewscrypto    octobre 22, 2025   

This year’s iPad Pro is what you might call a “chip refresh” or an “internal refresh.” These refreshes are what Apple generally does for its products for one or two or more years after making a larger external design change. Leaving the physical design alone preserves compatibility with the accessory ecosystem.

For the Mac, chip refreshes are still pretty exciting to me, because many people who use a Mac will, very occasionally, assign it some kind of task where they need it to work as hard and fast as it can, for an extended period of time. You could be a developer compiling a large and complex app, or you could be a podcaster or streamer editing or exporting an audio or video file, or maybe you’re just playing a game. The power and flexibility of the operating system, and first- and third-party apps made to take advantage of that power and flexibility, mean that “more speed” is still exciting, even if it takes a few years for that speed to add up to something users will consistently notice and appreciate.

And then there’s the iPad Pro. Especially since Apple shifted to using the same M-series chips that it uses in Macs, most iPad Pro reviews contain some version of “this is great hardware that is much faster than it needs to be for anything the iPad does.” To wit, our review of the M4 iPad Pro from May 2024:

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Even with protections, wolves still fear humans

Even with protections, wolves still fear humans

fivenewscrypto    octobre 22, 2025   

In May 2025, the European Parliament changed the status of wolves in the EU from “strictly protected” to “protected,” which opened the way for its member states to allow hunting under certain conditions, such as protecting livestock. One of the arguments behind this change was that the “tolerance of modern society towards wolves” led to the emergence of “fearless wolves” that are no longer afraid of people.

“Regulators made it clear, though, that there is no scientific evidence to back this up,” says Michael Clinchy, a zoologist at Western University in London, Canada. “So we did the first-of-its-kind study to find out if wolves have really lost their fear of humans. We proved there is no such thing as a fearless wolf.”

Red riding hood

The big bad wolf trope is found in plenty of our myths and fables, with Little Red Riding Hood being probably the most famous example. This mythical fear of wolves, combined with real damage to livestock, led to extensive hunting. By the mid-20th century, we’d pushed wolves to the verge of extinction in Western and Central Europe. Human-wolf encounters became very rare, and the big bad wolf myth faded away. But starting in the 1970s, wolves became a protected species across Europe and North America, which caused wolf populations to bounce back and reoccupy some of their old habitats.

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Big Tech may fall short of green energy targets due to proposed rule changes

Big Tech may fall short of green energy targets due to proposed rule changes

fivenewscrypto    octobre 22, 2025   

The world’s leading authority on carbon accounting has proposed stricter disclosure rules that are set to make it more challenging for large power users such as Amazon and Meta to hit their climate targets.

The EU, California, and the International Financial Reporting Standards all draw on the voluntary Greenhouse Gas Protocol oversight body in their guidelines on how companies should disclose their carbon footprints.

This week, the Protocol proposed the first update in a decade to how it measures power-sector emissions, in a move that would upend the way many tech, industrial, and utilities groups account for clean energy investments.

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It wasn’t space debris that struck a United Airlines plane—it was a weather balloon

It wasn’t space debris that struck a United Airlines plane—it was a weather balloon

fivenewscrypto    octobre 22, 2025   

The mysterious impact of a United Airlines aircraft in flight last week has sparked plenty of theories as to its cause, from space debris to high-flying birds.

However the question of what happened to flight 1093, and its severely damaged front window, appears to be answered in the form of a weather balloon.

“I think this was a WindBorne balloon,” Kai Marshland, co-founder of the weather prediction company WindBorne Systems, told Ars in an email on Monday evening. “We learned about UA1093 and the potential that it was related to one of our balloons at 11 pm PT on Sunday and immediately looked into it. At 6 am PT, we sent our preliminary investigation to both NTSB and FAA, and are working with both of them to investigate further.”

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NSO permanently barred from targeting WhatsApp users with Pegasus spyware

NSO permanently barred from targeting WhatsApp users with Pegasus spyware

fivenewscrypto    octobre 22, 2025   

A federal judge has ordered spyware maker NSO to stop using its Pegasus app to target or infect users of WhatsApp.

The ruling, issued Friday by Phyllis J. Hamilton of the US District Court of the District of Northern California, grants a permanent injunction sought by WhatsApp owner Meta in a case it brought against NSO in 2019. The lawsuit alleged that Meta caught NSO trying to surreptitiously infect about 1,400 mobile phones—many belonging to attorneys, journalists, human-rights activists, political dissidents, diplomats, and senior foreign government officials—with Pegasus. As part of the campaign, NSO created fake WhatsApp accounts and targeted Meta infrastructure. The suit sought monetary awards and an injunction against the practice.

Setting a precedent

Friday’s ruling ordered NSO to permanently cease targeting WhatsApp users, attempting to infect their devices, or intercepting WhatsApp messages, which are end-to-end encrypted using the open source Signal Protocol. Hamilton also ruled that NSO must delete any data it obtained when targeting the WhatsApp users.

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Why did NASA’s chief just shake up the agency’s plans to land on the Moon?

Why did NASA’s chief just shake up the agency’s plans to land on the Moon?

fivenewscrypto    octobre 22, 2025   

NASA acting Administrator Sean Duffy made two television appearances on Monday morning in which he shook up the space agency’s plans to return humans to the Moon.

Speaking on Fox News, where the secretary of transportation frequently appears in his acting role as NASA chief, Duffy said SpaceX has fallen behind in its efforts to develop the Starship vehicle as a lunar lander. Duffy also indirectly acknowledged that NASA’s projected target of a 2027 crewed lunar landing is no longer achievable. Accordingly, he said he intended to expand the competition to develop a lander capable of carrying humans down to the Moon from lunar orbit and back.

“They’re behind schedule, and so the President wants to make sure we beat the Chinese,” Duffy said of SpaceX. “He wants to get there in his term. So I’m in the process of opening that contract up. I think we’ll see companies like Blue [Origin] get involved, and maybe others. We’re going to have a space race in regard to American companies competing to see who can actually lead us back to the Moon first.”

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