Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr accused Comcast of "news distortion" because its subsidiary NBC isn't parroting the Trump administration narrative on the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

"Comcast knows that federal law requires its licensed operations to serve the public interest. News distortion doesn't cut it," Carr wrote in a post on X yesterday.

Carr's use of the phrase "news distortion" is significant because he has been invoking the FCC's rarely enforced news distortion policy to pressure licensed broadcasters that he perceives as being biased against President Trump. For a detailed look at Carr's fight against media, read our feature: " The speech police: Chairman Brendan Carr and the FCC's news distortion policy ."

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On Thursday, Norwegian company Equinor announced that it was suspending the construction of a planned 800 MW-capacity offshore wind farm currently being built in the waters off New York. The reason? An order from US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who alleged that the project was rushed through review .

The move comes as the US's nascent offshore wind industry is facing uncertainty, with all future leases placed on hold by an executive order issued on the day of Trump's inauguration. The hold was ostensibly put in place to allow time to review the permitting process. But Burgum's move comes the same week a report from the Government Accountability Office, done in response to the executive order, found only minor issues with the existing permitting process.

On hold

The Equnior project, termed Empire Wind , is a key part of New York's plans to meet its climate goals. Combined with a second phase that's currently in planning, Empire Wind would have a rated capacity of two gigawatts, or over 20 percent of the state's planned offshore wind capacity. The initial construction, combined with the development of shore facilities, already has an estimated value of $2.5 billion, Equinor estimates, and is currently employing roughly 1,500 people. Construction was expected to be complete in 2027, although energy production from a subset of the 54 planned 15 MW turbines could have begun before then.

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Google's Gemini AI may have had a slow start, but it has been anything but in 2025. Barely a week goes by that another model doesn't arrive in the Gemini app or developer tools like AI Studio, and there's a major release coming to the app today. Google has announced that its faster, more efficient Gemini 2.5 Flash model is rolling out widely in preview. At the same time, developers can begin building with 2.5 Flash using the company's newly announced API pricing, which Google says is much lower than competing products.

A gaggle of Gemini

The model dropdown in the Gemini app is a bit convoluted, particularly as we see products like Veo 2 and Personalization popping up there. Google has been releasing so many preview models and new ways of using Gemini that it can be hard to know which option to choose for a given task. In fairness, Google is far from the only major AI player with this problem.

Tulsee Doshi is Google's director of product management for Gemini, which means she leads the team building these models. We asked Doshi what version of Gemini she finds herself using, and unsurprisingly, she likes the more powerful option. "Typically right now, I have been using 2.5 Pro," says Doshi. "I use Gemini throughout the day for my work in a few key areas, like creating documents or slides. That's either for internal consumption or actually sharing externally, and I've found 2.5 Pro to be really helpful for the creative writing element."

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Synology, maker of network-attached storage (NAS) devices, will seemingly remove advanced features from its Plus devices that are not using hard drives provided by, or certified by, Synology itself, starting with its 2025 lineup.

A report on the German site HardwareLuxx (translated by Google) and a press release on Synology's German-language website appear to confirm Synology's strategy. The company, which sees "significant benefits" to its "proprietary hard drive solution" (also per Google's translation), will be "expanding [its] integrated ecosystem to the Plus series." For those Plus series models released in 2025, only Synology's own hard drives, and third-party drives certified by Synology, will offer "the full range of functions and support." Synology's release states that it can provide the "highest levels of security and performance, while also offering significantly more efficient support."

Ars has contacted Synology's US offices for comment and will update this post with any response.

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On Wednesday, news broke that researchers had found the most compelling evidence yet of a "biosignature"—a chemical present at levels that are only consistent with life—on a distant exoplanet. It didn't take much time for some less-than-reliable news sources to go from there to talk of a planet that "could be 'teeming with life'" and the obvious follow-up , "Scientists reveal what aliens could REALLY look like on exoplanet K2-18b."

Even in the best of circumstances, however, talk of a biosignature is an invitation to scientists to think of alternative chemistries that could explain the chemistry without needing biological activity. And these are not the best of circumstances, as astronomers are pointing to earlier papers that give a range of reasons to be skeptical of the new results; in fact, an astronomer named Chris Glein emailed me to alert me of potential issues the day before the news broke.

To help you understand the controversy, we're going to look at the data that is being presented as evidence of a biosignature and then go through all the reasons that confirming a biosignature is so difficult.

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Chris Krebs, the former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director who was fired by President Trump in 2020 and targeted in a Trump order last week, said he left his job at a security company in order to focus on fighting back against the Trump administration.

Trump fired Krebs in November 2020 when the then-CISA chief disputed Trump's baseless claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him. Krebs was until this week the chief intelligence and public policy officer for security vendor SentinelOne. Krebs and SentinelOne were both targeted by Trump in an April 9 presidential memorandum titled, "Addressing Risks from Chris Krebs and Government Censorship."

The Trump order called Krebs "a significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority" and whose "misconduct involved the censorship of disfavored speech implicating the 2020 election and COVID-19 pandemic."

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai has reportedly set a goal for the company to reach 500 million Gemini users before the end of 2025. Rolling out new models may help the company get there, but you know what else helps? Giving away premium features for free. Google has announced today that it's giving all US college students free access to Gemini Advanced, and not just for a month or two—the offer is good for a full year of service.

With Gemini Advanced, you get access to the more capable Pro models , as well as unlimited use of the Deep Research tool based on it. Subscribers also get a smattering of other AI tools, like the Veo 2 video generator, NotebookLM, and Gemini Live. The offer is for the Google One AI Premium plan, so it includes more than premium AI models, like Gemini features in Google Drive and 2TB of Drive storage.

Google has a new landing page for the deal, allowing eligible students to sign up for their free Google One AI Premium plan. The offer is valid from now until June 30. Anyone who takes Google up on it will enjoy the free plan through spring 2026. The company hasn't specified an end date, but we would wager it will be June of next year. Google's intention is to give students an entire school year of Gemini Advanced from now through finals next year. At the end of the term, you can bet Google will try to convert students to paying subscribers.

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The verdict is in, and Google has been found to illegally hold online ad tech monopolies.

For over a decade, "Google has willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising," tying its publisher ad server and ad exchange together "to establish and protect its monopoly power in these two markets," the ruling said.

At trial, the DOJ argued that Google's ad business expanded to choke out competitors and benefit only Google. They argued that Google "rigged" ad auctions, allegedly controlling "multiple parts" of services used to place ads all over the Internet, unfairly advantaging itself in various markets.

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The critically acclaimed 2002 film 28 Days Later is often credited with sparking the 21st-century revival of the zombie genre. Director Danny Boyle is back with more zombie-virus dystopian horror in his new film set in the same fictional world, 28 Years Later —not so much a direct sequel but the start of a new planned trilogy.

(Some spoilers for 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later below.)

In 28 Days Later , a highly contagious "Rage Virus" is accidentally released from a lab in Cambridge, England. Those infected turn into violent, mindless monsters who brutally attack the uninfected—so-called "fast zombies." Transmitted by bites, scratches, or even just by getting a drop of infected blood in one's mouth, the virus spreads rapidly, effectively collapsing society. A bicycle courier named Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakens from a coma 28 days later to find London mostly deserted, apart from a handful of survivors fleeing the infected hordes, and joins them in the pursuit of safety. Jim (barely) survives, and we see zombies dying of starvation in the streets during the denouement.

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