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      Trump’s move of SPACECOM to Alabama has little to do with national security

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 3 September 2025

    President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that US Space Command will be relocated from Colorado to Alabama, returning to the Pentagon's plans for the command's headquarters from the final days of Trump's first term in the White House.

    The headquarters will move to the Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Trump made the announcement in the Oval Office, flanked by Republican members of the Alabama congressional delegation.

    The move will "help America defend and dominate the high frontier," Trump said. It also marks another twist on a contentious issue that has pitted Colorado and Alabama against one another in a fight for the right to be home to the permanent headquarters of Space Command (SPACECOM), a unified combatant command responsible for carrying out military operations in space.

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      The new Dolby Vision 2 HDR standard is probably going to be controversial

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 September 2025

    Dolby has announced the features of Dolby Vision 2, its successor to the popular Dolby Vision HDR format.

    Whereas the original Dolby Vision was meant to give creators the ability to finely tune exactly how TVs present content in HDR, Dolby Vision 2 appears to significantly broaden that feature to include motion handling as well—and it also tries to bridge the gap between filmmaker intent and the on-the-ground reality of the individual viewing environments.

    What does that mean, exactly? Well, Dolby says one of the pillars of Dolby Vision 2 will be "Content Intelligence," which introduces new "AI capabilities" to the Dolby Vision spec. Among other things, that means using sensors in the TV to try to fix the oft-complained-about issue of shows being too dark.

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      OTC nasal spray seemed to cut COVID infections by 67% in mid-sized trial

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 September 2025 • 1 minute

    Daily squirts of a safe, over-the-counter allergy nasal spray may prevent COVID-19 infections from taking hold, according to results published Tuesday in JAMA Internal Medicine . In a mid-staged trial, the spray appeared to reduce infections by promising 67 percent, though a larger trial will need to confirm that robust efficacy.

    The trial was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 2 trial conducted by researchers at Germany's Saarland University between March 2023 and July 2024. The study included 450 healthy adults, about half of whom (227) spritzed their noses three times a day with the generic antihistamine nasal spray, azelastine, which can be purchased over the counter in the US. The placebo, meanwhile, was a spray with an identical composition except for the absence of the antihistamine. The two groups had similar mixes of previous COVID-19 vaccination and infection statuses.

    After about 56 days of frequent mistings, only five people using the allergy spray (2.2 percent) caught a SARS-CoV-2 infection, while 15 people using a placebo (6.7 percent) got the pandemic infection. That 4.5 percentage-point drop represents a 67 percent reduction in COVID-19 cases, though the numbers here are small. Still, the researchers noted that the five people using the allergy spray who contracted COVID-19 took more time to get the infection than the 15 in the placebo group (31 days versus 19.5). This could hint that the spray held off some infections from exposures early in the trial. And when the allergy spray users did get COVID-19, they were positive on a rapid antigen test for less time than those infected in the placebo group (3.4 days versus 5.1 days), suggesting they cleared the virus a bit faster.

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      Google won’t have to sell Chrome, judge rules

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 September 2025 • 1 minute

    Google has avoided the worst-case scenario in the pivotal search antitrust case brought by the US Department of Justice. DC District Court Judge Amit Mehta has ruled that Google doesn't have to give up the Chrome browser to mitigate its illegal monopoly in online search. The court will only require a handful of modest behavioral remedies, forcing Google to release some search data to competitors and limit its ability to make exclusive distribution deals.

    More than a year ago, the Department of Justice (DOJ) secured a major victory when Google was found to have violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. The remedy phase took place earlier this year, with the DOJ calling for Google to divest the market-leading Chrome browser . That was the most notable element of the government's proposed remedies, but it also wanted to explore a spin-off of Android, force Google to share search technology, and severely limit the distribution deals Google is permitted to sign.

    Mehta has decided on a much narrower set of remedies. While there will be some changes to search distribution, Google gets to hold onto Chrome. The government contended that Google's dominance in Chrome was key to its search lock-in, but Google claimed no other company could hope to operate Chrome and Chromium like it does. Mehta has decided that Google's use of Chrome as a vehicle for search is not illegal in itself, though. "Plaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divesture ( sic ) of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints," the ruling reads.

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      A robot walks on water thanks to evolution’s solution

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 September 2025

    Robots can serve pizza, crawl over alien planets, swim like octopuses and jellyfish, cosplay as humans, and even perform surgery. But can they walk on water?

    Rhagobot isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind at the mention of a robot. Inspired by Rhagovelia water striders, semiaquatic insects also known as ripple bugs, these tiny bots can glide across rushing streams because of the robotization of an evolutionary adaptation.

    Rhagovelia (as opposed to other species of water striders) have fan-like appendages toward the ends of their middle legs that passively open and close depending on how the water beneath them is moving. This is why they appear to glide effortlessly across the water’s surface. Biologist Victor Ortega-Jimenez of the University of California, Berkeley, was intrigued by how such tiny insects can accelerate and pull off rapid turns and other maneuvers, almost as if they are flying across a liquid surface.

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      Tesla has a new master plan—it just doesn’t have any specifics

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 September 2025

    Yesterday afternoon, while much of the country enjoyed Labor Day, Tesla CEO Elon Musk published a new master plan for the company to his social media platform. It's the fourth such document for Tesla, replacing the goals Musk laid out in 2023 when he said the company would sell 20 million EVs a year in 2030. This time, it is not entirely sure what Tesla's plan actually entails. The text, which reads as though it was written by AI, is at times anodyne, at times confusing, but always free of specifics.

    Each iteration of the master plan is Tesla's north star, the new plan reads, promising to "to deliver unconstrained sustainability without compromise," whatever that actually means.

    "Now, we are combining our manufacturing capabilities with our autonomous prowess to deliver new products and services that will accelerate global prosperity and human thriving driven by economic growth shared by all," reads the plan.

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      Revolving door: Ex-senator becomes cable industry’s top lobbyist

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 September 2025

    The cable industry's top lobbying group has a new president and CEO. Cory Gardner, a Republican who spent 10 years in Congress, was announced today as the new head of NCTA-The Internet & Television Association.

    Gardner represented Colorado in the US senate from 2015 to 2021 and was in the US House of Representatives from 2011 to 2015. He had to leave the Senate after losing a re-election bid and later became chairman of the Senate Leadership Fund , a super PAC devoted to "protecting and expanding the Republican Senate Majority."

    Gardner will take over the NCTA's reins on September 22, replacing Michael Powell, who is retiring from the lobby group after nearly 15 years. Before becoming the cable industry's chief lobbyist, Powell was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 2001 to 2005. Powell led a Republican majority at the FCC.

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      This ultra-rare ’90s LaserDisc game console can finally be emulated on a PC

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 September 2025

    Here in the year 2025, it's not every day that a classic gaming console from the 20th century becomes playable via emulation for the first time. But that's just what happened last week with the release of Ares v146 and its first-of-its-kind support for Mega LD titles designed for the Pioneer LaserActive .

    Even retro console superfans would be forgiven for not knowing about the LaserActive , a pricey LaserDisc player released in 1994 alongside swappable hardware modules that could add support for Sega Genesis and NEC TurboGrafx-16 games and controllers. Using those add-ons, you could also play a handful of games specifically designed for the LaserActive format , which combined game data and graphics with up to 60 minutes of full-screen, standard-definition analog video per side.

    Mega-LD games (as the Genesis-compatible LaserActive titles were called) were, for the most part, super-sized versions of the types of games you'd find on early CD-ROM console of the era. That means a lot of edutainment titles, branching dungeon crawlers, Dragon's Lair -style animated quick-time event challenges, and rail shooters that overlayed standard Genesis or TG-16 graphics on top of elaborate animated video backgrounds (sometimes complete with filmed actors).

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      Google says Gmail security is “strong and effective” as it denies major breach

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 September 2025 • 1 minute

    The sky is falling, and Gmail has supposedly been hacked to bits by malicious parties unknown. Or has it? Reports circulated last week claiming that Gmail was the subject of a major data breach, citing a series of warnings Google has distributed and increasing reports of phishing attacks. The hysteria was short-lived, though. In a brief post on its official blog, Google says that Gmail's security is "strong and effective," and reports to the contrary are mistaken.

    This story seems to have developed due to a random confluence of security events. Google experienced a Gmail data breach in June, but the attack was limited to the company's corporate Salesforce server. The hacker was able to access publicly available information like business names and contact details, but no private information was compromised.

    Over the following weeks, Google alerted Gmail users to an increase in phishing attacks in July and August. It didn't offer many details, but many believed the spike in phishing was related to the corporate server breach. Indeed, more people are talking about hacking attempts on social media right now. This led to the claim that Gmail's entire user base of 2.5 billion people was about to be hacked at any moment, with some reports advising everyone to change their passwords and enable two-factor authentication. While that's generally good security advice, Google says the truth is much less dramatic.

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