Amazon won’t release Fire Sticks that support sideloading anymore

Amazon won’t release Fire Sticks that support sideloading anymore

fivenewscrypto    avril 19, 2026   

The writing was on the wall, and now it's on Amazon’s website. Newly released Fire Sticks will not support the sideloading of Android apps or any other software from outside Amazon’s official app store.

The proof comes from an update to Amazon’s website for developers, which currently reads:

Starting with Fire TV Stick 4K Select [which came out in October], all future Fire TV Sticks will run on Vega.

According to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the website has included that statement since at least January. But Amazon hasn’t made this declaration so outrightly to consumers, many of whom are just now learning about Amazon’s commitment to its new, proprietary operating system (OS), Vega OS. Amazon declined to comment to Lowpass this week after “multiple sources with knowledge of” Amazon’s plans reportedly told the publication that all future Fire TV sticks would launch with Vega.

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Ridley Scott's post-apocalyptic The Dog Stars drops first trailer

Ridley Scott's post-apocalyptic The Dog Stars drops first trailer

fivenewscrypto    avril 19, 2026   

Post-apocalyptic scenarios are a longtime staple of science fiction, and director Ridley Scott's latest film, The Dog Stars, falls firmly into that subgenre. Based on Peter Heller's critically acclaimed 2012 novel, the story depicts the aftermath of a deadly flu virus that wiped out most of humanity. The studio released the first trailer at CinemaCon, introduced by a video message from Scott, who said that his adaptation "is particularly tailored for the big screen. Every frame, I hope, will really blow you away."

Per the official logline, the film is "a riveting, epic thriller set in a world where survival is instinct, but humanity is a choice. Scott tells the story of Hig, a young pilot who, together with a military survivalist, Bangley, has carved out an efficient but isolated homestead in a brutal post-apocalyptic world until a mysterious radio transmission spurs Hig to venture into the unknown in search of the hope and humanity he still believes exists."

Jacob Elordi stars as Hig, alongside Josh Brolin as Bangley; Margaret Qualley plays a young medic named Cima; and Guy Pearce is a former Navy SEAL Pops who also happens to be Cima's father. Allison Janney and Benedict Wong will also appear in as-yet-undisclosed roles. (Janney, clad in what looks like a vintage stewardess uniform, briefly appears in the trailer.)

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Artemis II pilot talks about what it was really like to fly and land in Orion

Artemis II pilot talks about what it was really like to fly and land in Orion

fivenewscrypto    avril 19, 2026   

The crew of Artemis II spoke with the media on Thursday, six days after returning to Earth following their mission around the Moon. After a news conference, the astronauts gave a handful of interviews, and Ars was able to speak with Orion's pilot, Victor Glover.

Glover and Ars first connected nearly a decade ago as part of our homage to Apollo, The Greatest Leap. Glover now stands at the vanguard of our modern Apollo program, named Artemis, which aims to return humans to the Moon and establish a semi-permanent base there.

Glover, an accomplished naval aviator, first went to space in November 2020 as the pilot on the first operational Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station. Two years after he landed back on Earth, Glover was assigned to the Artemis II mission and tasked with a majority of the test piloting of the Orion spacecraft during the outbound and return journey from the Moon.

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Meta's AI spending spree is helping make its Quest headsets more expensive

Meta's AI spending spree is helping make its Quest headsets more expensive

fivenewscrypto    avril 19, 2026   

The rising costs of RAM and other computing components are pushing up the price of Meta's Quest VR headsets, which the company says will increase by $50–$100 (about 12–20 percent) starting on April 19. In announcing that price increase on Thursday, the company cited the "global surge in the price of critical components—specifically memory chips—[that] is impacting almost every category of consumer electronics, including VR."

But unlike many of the other tech companies that have been pushed into similar price increases in recent months, Meta's own spending priorities are at least partly to blame for the rising prices of those components. The company's recent hard pivot to the "AI superintelligence" race has directly contributed to the conditions that are now making its own Quest headsets more expensive.

Spending like a drunk sailor

In January, Meta announced that it plans to spend $115 billion to $135 billion on capital expenditures this year, up significantly from $72 billion in 2025 and just $28 billion as recently as 2023. The vast majority of that investment is going into AI infrastructure, including a recent $21 billion in new investment in data center company CoreWeave (in addition to $14.2 billion originally committed) and an additional $10 billion recently committed to a planned El Paso data center (up from $1.5 billion initially).

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Rocket Report: Starship V3 test-fired; ESA's tentative step toward crew launch

Rocket Report: Starship V3 test-fired; ESA's tentative step toward crew launch

fivenewscrypto    avril 19, 2026   

Welcome to Edition 8.37 of the Rocket Report! NASA is still climbing down from the high of the Artemis II mission, the first flight by humans to the Moon since 1972. What a mission it was! Now, attention turns to completing development of a lander to get astronauts down to the Moon's surface. Among other things, we chronicle the latest progress of NASA's two lunar lander contractors, SpaceX and Blue Origin, 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.

Moonshot from the last frontier. Israel-based space launch company Moonshot Space will site its first electromagnetic accelerator in Fairbanks, Alaska, under a memorandum of understanding signed at Space Symposium with spaceport operator Alaska Aerospace Corporation (AAC), Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Moonshot, which emerged from stealth mode in December with $12 million in fundraising, is developing a high-power electromagnetic launcher system to propel payloads and enable cargo deliveries into space at hypersonic speed using electricity rather than chemical fuels, The Times of Israel reports.

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Recent advances push Big Tech closer to the Q-Day danger zone

Recent advances push Big Tech closer to the Q-Day danger zone

fivenewscrypto    avril 19, 2026   

Sometime around 2010, sophisticated malware known as Flame hijacked the mechanism that Microsoft used to distribute updates to millions of Windows computers around the world. The malware—reportedly jointly developed by the US and Israel—pushed a malicious update throughout an infected network belonging to the Iranian government.

The lynchpin of the "collision" attack was an exploit of MD5, a cryptographic hash function Microsoft was using to authenticate digital certificates. By minting a cryptographically perfect digital signature based on MD5, the attackers forged a certificate that authenticated their malicious update server. Had the attack been used more broadly, it would have had catastrophic consequences worldwide.

Getting uncomfortably close to the danger zone

The event, which came to light in 2012, now serves as a cautionary tale for cryptography engineers as they contemplate the downfall of two crucial cryptography algorithms used everywhere. Since 2004, MD5 has been known to be vulnerable to "collisions," a fatal flaw that allows adversaries to generate two distinct inputs that produce identical outputs.

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After a saga of broken promises, a European rover finally has a ride to Mars

After a saga of broken promises, a European rover finally has a ride to Mars

fivenewscrypto    avril 19, 2026   

NASA confirmed Thursday that SpaceX will launch the European Space Agency's Rosalind Franklin Mars rover, perhaps as soon as late 2028, on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

So why is NASA deciding which rocket will launch a flagship European Mars mission? It's a long story involving the search for extraterrestrial life, crippling political hatchets, and of all things, Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

You can trace the history of Europe's Rosalind Franklin mission back nearly a quarter-century. A few years after NASA landed its first rover on Mars in 1997, the European Space Agency came up with a plan to send its own mobile robot to the red planet. The European rover was part of a program named Aurora, and officials hoped to launch it in 2009. Russia would have supplied a Soyuz rocket to send the rover on its way.

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