With recent Falcon 9 milestones, SpaceX vindicates its “dumb” approach to reuse

With recent Falcon 9 milestones, SpaceX vindicates its “dumb” approach to reuse

fivenewscrypto    août 29, 2025   

As SpaceX's Starship vehicle gathered all of the attention this week, the company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket continued to hit some impressive milestones.

Both occurred during relatively anonymous launches of the company's Starlink satellites but are nonetheless notable because they underscore the value of first-stage reuse, which SpaceX has pioneered over the last decade.

The first milestone occurred on Wednesday morning with the launch of the Starlink 10-56 mission from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The first stage that launched these satellites, Booster 1096, was making its second launch and successfully landed on the Just Read the Instructions drone ship. Strikingly, this was the 400th time SpaceX has executed a drone ship landing.

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Unpacking Passkeys Pwned: Possibly the most specious research in decades

Unpacking Passkeys Pwned: Possibly the most specious research in decades

fivenewscrypto    août 29, 2025   

Don’t believe everything you read—especially when it’s part of a marketing pitch designed to sell security services.

The latest example of the runaway hype that can come from such pitches is research published today by SquareX, a startup selling services for securing browsers and other client-side applications. It claims, without basis, to have found a “major passkey vulnerability” that undermines the lofty security promises made by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and thousands of other companies that have enthusiastically embraced passkeys.

Ahoy, face-palm ahead

“Passkeys Pwned,” the attack described in the research, was demonstrated earlier this month in a Defcon presentation. It relies on a malicious browser extension, installed in an earlier social engineering attack, that hijacks the process for creating a passkey for use on Gmail, Microsoft 365, or any of the other thousands of sites that now use the alternative form of authentication.

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Russian space official: “We need to stop lying to ourselves” about health of industry

Russian space official: “We need to stop lying to ourselves” about health of industry

fivenewscrypto    août 29, 2025   

The chief of Russia's main spacecraft manufacturer issued a dire warning this week, saying that his corporation has reached a "critical" condition and cannot continue in its present state.

"The situation is critical: multi-million dollar debts, interest on loans that 'eat up' the budget, many processes that are ineffective, and a significant part of the team has lost motivation and a sense of shared responsibility," said Igor Maltsev, chief of RSC Energia, which is located near Moscow.

Maltsev's remarks were first published by Gazeta.ru, one of the largest Russian news websites. Later, they were reposted on the "Forgive us Yura," Telegram channel, the name of which references cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and primarily has content that focuses on critiques of Russia's space program. Multiple sources confirmed that the statement is legitimate.

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Anthropic’s auto-clicking AI Chrome extension raises browser-hijacking concerns

Anthropic’s auto-clicking AI Chrome extension raises browser-hijacking concerns

fivenewscrypto    août 29, 2025   

As AI assistants become capable of controlling web browsers, a new security challenge has emerged: users must now trust that every website they visit won't try to hijack their AI agent with hidden malicious instructions. Experts voiced concerns about this emerging threat this week after testing from a leading AI chatbot vendor revealed that AI browser agents can be successfully tricked into harmful actions nearly a quarter of the time.

On Tuesday, Anthropic announced the launch of Claude for Chrome, a web browser-based AI agent that can take actions on behalf of users. Due to security concerns, the extension is only rolling out as a research preview to 1,000 subscribers on Anthropic's Max plan, which costs between $100 and $200 per month, with a waitlist available for other users.

The Claude for Chrome extension allows users to chat with the Claude AI model in a sidebar window that maintains the context of everything happening in their browser. Users can grant Claude permission to perform tasks like managing calendars, scheduling meetings, drafting email responses, handling expense reports, and testing website features.

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Chris Roberts hopes Squadron 42 will be “almost as big” as GTA VI next year

Chris Roberts hopes Squadron 42 will be “almost as big” as GTA VI next year

fivenewscrypto    août 29, 2025   

The single-player Star Citizen spin-off Squadron 42 is slated to finally be in players' hands in 2026, 11 full years after its initial 2015 release target. And after all that time, Cloud Imperium Games CEO Chris Roberts says he's hopeful that the title will be received similarly to another 2026 release that happens to be possibly the most anticipated video game of all time: Grand Theft Auto VI.

A recent report from French Canadian outlet La Presse (translated) suggests that Squadron 42's launch is being timed so that it "won't be overshadowed" by the planned May launch of Grand Theft Auto VI. "We're hoping it'll be almost as big an event," Roberts said in comparing the two upcoming releases in an interview with the French paper. "Other than GTA VI, it's probably the biggest-budget AAA game [of the year]."

That's a pretty bold claim, considering Squadron 42's very public and tumultuous path to a purported "feature complete" status in 2023. But it seems at least somewhat reasonable when you consider that GTA VI's development budget of nearly $1 billion lines up closely with $859 million in crowdfunding currently being reported for Star Citizen as a whole.

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Under pressure after setbacks, SpaceX’s huge rocket finally goes the distance

Under pressure after setbacks, SpaceX’s huge rocket finally goes the distance

fivenewscrypto    août 29, 2025   

STARBASE, Texas—SpaceX launched the 10th test flight of the company's Starship rocket Tuesday evening, sending the stainless steel spacecraft halfway around the world to an on-target splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The largely successful mission for the world's largest rocket was an important milestone for SpaceX's Starship program after months of repeated setbacks, including three disappointing test flights and a powerful explosion on the ground that destroyed the ship that engineers were originally readying for this launch.

For the first time, SpaceX engineers received data on the performance of the ship's upgraded heat shield and control flaps during reentry back into the atmosphere. The three failed Starship test flights to start the year ended before the ship reached reentry. Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, has described developing a durable, reliable heat shield as the most pressing challenge for making Starship a fully and rapidly reusable rocket.

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The first stars may not have been as uniformly massive as we thought

The first stars may not have been as uniformly massive as we thought

fivenewscrypto    août 28, 2025   

For decades, astronomers have wondered what the very first stars in the universe were like. These stars formed new chemical elements, which enriched the universe and allowed the next generations of stars to form the first planets.

The first stars were initially composed of pure hydrogen and helium, and they were massive—hundreds to thousands of times the mass of the Sun and millions of times more luminous. Their short lives ended in enormous explosions called supernovae, so they had neither the time nor the raw materials to form planets, and they should no longer exist for astronomers to observe.

At least that’s what we thought.

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