A private space company has a radical new plan to bag an asteroid

A private space company has a radical new plan to bag an asteroid

fivenewscrypto    mars 20, 2026   

It may sound fanciful, but a Los Angeles-based company says it has conceived of a plan to fly out to a smallish, near-Earth asteroid, throw a large bag around it, and bring the body back to a "safe" gathering point near our planet.

The company, TransAstra, said Wednesday that an unnamed customer has agreed to fund a study of its proposed "New Moon" mission to capture and relocate an asteroid approximately the size of a house, with a mass of about 100 metric tons.

"We envision it becoming a base for robotic research and development on materials processing and manufacturing," said Joel Sercel, chief executive officer of TransAstra. "Long term, instead of building space hardware on the ground and launching propellant up from the Earth, we could harvest it from raw materials in space."

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Federal cyber experts called Microsoft's cloud a "pile of shit," approved it anyway

Federal cyber experts called Microsoft's cloud a "pile of shit," approved it anyway

fivenewscrypto    mars 19, 2026   

In late 2024, the federal government’s cybersecurity evaluators rendered a troubling verdict on one of Microsoft’s biggest cloud computing offerings.

The tech giant’s “lack of proper detailed security documentation” left reviewers with a “lack of confidence in assessing the system’s overall security posture,” according to an internal government report reviewed by ProPublica.

Or, as one member of the team put it: “The package is a pile of shit.”

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A station wagon is entering one of the hardest 24-hour races in the world

A station wagon is entering one of the hardest 24-hour races in the world

fivenewscrypto    mars 19, 2026   

It is a strange quirk of fate that the station wagon has morphed from mass-market family transport into something far more esoteric (at least here in the US, a market that once embraced the form factor like no other). Now, wagons come in two flavors. There's the "slightly lifted with some extra protective cladding" kind, designed with forest roads in mind but equally useful if you're surrounded by people who park by sense of smell. The other variety is the one that thinks it's really a supercar, with at least 600 hp (447 kW) and the ability to test if the kids and family dog get nauseous when subjected to high lateral Gs.

Even then, the US misses out. BMW will sell us an M5 Touring here, a plug-in hybrid wagon with 717 hp (535 kW), but it has no plans to bring over the smaller, (much) lighter M3 Touring, no matter how much we plead. That's a shame, as the M3 Touring is about to become even cooler: BMW is entering one in the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie, which races at the infamous racetrack in the Eifel Mountains.

The idea started as an April Fool's joke last year, but the overwhelmingly positive reaction from fans worked something loose, and someone in Munich signed off on a budget to make a station wagon version of its GT3 race car (the M4 GT3 EVO). It makes its NLS debut next week, with the highlight of the program being the Nürburgring 24H in mid-May. That race will also be contested by one Max Verstappen on a weekend away from F1.

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Apple can delist apps "with or without cause," judge says in loss for Musi app

Apple can delist apps "with or without cause," judge says in loss for Musi app

fivenewscrypto    mars 19, 2026   

Musi, a free music-streaming app that had tens of millions of iPhone downloads and garnered plenty of controversy over its method of acquiring music, has lost an attempt to get back on Apple's App Store. A federal judge dismissed Musi's lawsuit against Apple with prejudice and sanctioned Musi's lawyers for "mak[ing] up facts to fill the perceived gaps in Musi’s case."

Musi built a streaming service without striking its own deals with copyright holders. It did so by playing music from YouTube, writing in its 2024 lawsuit against Apple that "the Musi app plays or displays content based on the user’s own interactions with YouTube and enhances the user experience via Musi’s proprietary technology." Musi's app displayed its own ads but let users remove them for a one-time fee of $5.99.

Musi claimed it complied with YouTube's terms, but Apple removed it from the App Store in September 2024. Musi does not offer an Android app. Musi alleged that Apple delisted its app based on “unsubstantiated” intellectual property claims from YouTube and that Apple violated its own Developer Program License Agreement (DPLA) by delisting the app.

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Paul Atreides faces the cost of his holy war in Dune: Part 3 teaser

Paul Atreides faces the cost of his holy war in Dune: Part 3 teaser

fivenewscrypto    mars 19, 2026   

Warner Bros. just dropped a broody and haunting extended teaser for Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part 3, the highly anticipated third film in the director's acclaimed franchise—the last in his planned trilogy.

(Spoilers for first two films in the franchise below.)

In 2021's Dune, we first met Frank Herbert's iconic anti-hero, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet). That film culminated in the brutal defeat of House Atreides by rival House Harkonnen, with Paul and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), fleeing to the desert and taking refuge with the Fremen. Among them is Chani (Zendaya), whom Paul has been seeing in visions all along.

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Researchers disclose vulnerabilities in IP KVMs from four manufacturers

Researchers disclose vulnerabilities in IP KVMs from four manufacturers

fivenewscrypto    mars 19, 2026   

Researchers are warning about the risks posed by a low-cost device that can give insiders and hackers unusually broad powers in compromising networks.

The devices, which typically sell for $30 to $100, are known as IP KVMs. Administrators often use them to remotely access machines on networks. The devices, not much bigger than a deck of cards, allow the machines to be accessed at the BIOS/UEFI level, the firmware that runs before the loading of the operating system.

This provides power and convenience to admins, but in the wrong hands, the capabilities can often torpedo what might otherwise be a secure network. Risks are posed when the devices—which are exposed to the Internet—are deployed with weak security configurations or surreptitiously connected to by insiders. Firmware vulnerabilities also leave them open to remote takeover.

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Gamers react with overwhelming disgust to DLSS 5's generative AI glow-ups

Gamers react with overwhelming disgust to DLSS 5's generative AI glow-ups

fivenewscrypto    mars 19, 2026   

Since deep-learning super-sampling (DLSS) launched on 2018's RTX 2080 cards, gamers have been generally bullish on the technology as a way to effectively use machine-learning upscaling techniques to increase resolutions or juice frame rates in games. With yesterday's tease of the upcoming DLSS 5, though, Nvidia has crossed a line from mere upscaling into complete lighting and texture overhauls influenced by "generative AI." The result is a bland, uncanny gloss that has received an instant and overwhelmingly negative reaction from large swaths of gamers and the industry at large.

While previous DLSS releases rendered upscaled frames or created entirely new ones to smooth out gaps, Nvidia calls DLSS 5—which it plans to launch in Autumn—"a real-time neural rendering model" that can "deliver a new level of photoreal computer graphics previously only achieved in Hollywood visual effects." Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said explicitly that the technology melds "generative AI" with "handcrafted rendering" for "a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression."

Unlike existing generative video models, which Nvidia notes are "difficult to precisely control and often lack predictability," DLSS 5 uses a game's internal color and motion vectors "to infuse the scene with photoreal lighting and materials that are anchored to source 3D content and consistent from frame to frame." That underlying game data helps the system "understand complex scene semantics such as characters, hair, fabric and translucent skin, along with environmental lighting conditions like front-lit, back-lit or overcast," the company says.

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