Aspiring Starlink competitor Logos Space Services has secured FCC clearance to launch more than 4,000 broadband satellites into low Earth orbit by 2035, as reported by Space News. Under FCC regulations, the company must deploy half of the approved amount within the next seven years.

The company is headed by its founder, Milo Medin, a former project manager at NASA as well as a former vice president of wireless services at Google. The company has been raising money since it opened its doors in 2023 and reportedly hopes to deploy its first satellite by 2027. Logos’ planned low Earth orbit constellation would beam high-speed broadband internet to customers worldwide, including government and enterprise users, much like Starlink.

While the satellite broadband market is growing, Starlink remains the biggest player by far. The European Space Agency estimates there are just over 14,000 functioning satellites currently in orbit and we know that roughly 9,600 of them are a part of the Starlink constellation. The SpaceX subsidiary recently asked the FCC for clearance to launch a million satellites, though in reality, the FCC will likely trend closer to the 7,500 it approved on the last go-around. The ESA says it expects 100,000 satellites to be in orbit by 2030.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/a-potential-starlink-competitor-just-got-fcc-clearance-to-launch-4000-satellites-143905076.html?src=rss

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The 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics begin this week, and this year’s Opening Ceremony promises to be one for the ages. The three-hour event will feature performances from Mariah Carey and Andrea Bocelli, 3,000 athletes participating in the Parade of Nations, and not one but two Olympic cauldrons being lit. (One at Milan’s Arco della Pace, since Milan will serve as the main hub for this year’s Games, and the other in the Alpine city of Cortina d’Ampezzo, where events like skiing will take place.) The festivities are all happening this Friday, Feb. 6, and will air on NBC — you can tune in live on Friday afternoon starting at 2 p.m. ET, or wait for the primetime broadcast at 8 p.m. ET. 

If you want to tune in to the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics Opening Ceremony, we’ve got you covered. Here’s all the info you need to watch, including what channel it’s on, the broadcast schedule, and who will be there.  

How to watch the Opening Ceremony at the 2026 Winter Olympics

Date: Friday, Feb. 6

Time: Airs live from 2-5 p.m. ET, primetime re-air from 8-11 p.m. ET

Location: San Siro Stadium, Milan

TV channels: NBC

Streaming: Peacock, DirecTV, NBC.com, and more

Where can I stream the Opening Ceremony at the 2026 Winter Olympics?

How to watch the 2026 Opening Ceremony on TV:

There will be two broadcasts of the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony this Friday. You can tune in live from 2 p.m. – 5 p.m. ET on Friday afternoon, or catch the encore broadcast from 8 p.m. – 11 p.m. ET that night. Both broadcasts will air on NBC, which is available with DirecTV, Hulu + Live TV, and more.

With a live TV streaming service subscription or cable package, you can also catch all of NBC and Peacock’s Olympics coverage on NBC.com and via NBCOlympics.com or the NBC App, just by logging in with your provider.

How to watch the Opening Ceremony in Milan without cable:

You can watch the Opening Ceremony live or on-demand on Peacock. If you already subscribe to a live TV streaming service or cable package, you should also be able to catch all of Peacock’s Olympics coverage on NBC.com, NBCOlympics.com and the NBC app.

Who is hosting the Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony?

Sportscaster Terry Gannon will be hosting coverage of the 2026 Winter Games Opening Ceremony. Also appearing at the Opening Ceremony will be former Olympic snowboarder Shaun White, and NBC Olympics primetime host Mike Tirico will also participate remotely from San Francisco, where he’ll be pulling double duty covering the Olympics and prepping to call Super Bowl LX. 

Who is performing at the 2026 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony?

Mariah Carey will headline the Opening Ceremony, and the event will also include a performance from iconic Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. Actress Sabrina Impacciatore (The Paper, The White Lotus) and pianist Lang Lang, will also perform. And viewers will also get to see the nearly 3,000 Olympic athletes participating in the Parade of Nations. 

Where is the 2026 Olympics Opening Ceremony being held?

The 2026 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony will be held at Milan’s San Siro Stadium, home to football clubs AC Milan and Inter Milan. The Opening Ceremony will actually be one of the final events held at San Siro Stadium, it’s set to be demolished some time after the Games end.

More ways to watch the 2026 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/how-to-watch-the-opening-ceremony-at-the-2026-milan-cortina-winter-olympics-143529451.html?src=rss

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Right now, the factory-reconditioned model of the JBL Bar 1300X is $819.99 at Woot. That’s nearly $280 off from its usual $1,099.99 price on Amazon, and even below its previous low of $899.95, according to price-trackers. The reconditioned label here means it’s been tested and cleared to work as intended, not that it’s missing parts or support. Prime members get free shipping, and availability is limited to about three weeks or until stock runs out.

JBL Bar 1300X Soundbar

$819.99
at Woot

$819.99
at Woot

In use, the Bar 1300X feels closer to a traditional home theater than most soundbars. It has a fully wireless design with detachable rear satellites that don’t need any cables and run on battery (up to 12 hours), while the massive 12-inch subwoofer only needs a power outlet. The main bar itself connects via HDMI eARC, but you also get three additional HDMI inputs, plus optical and USB. It supports Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, Apple AirPlay, Google Cast, and Alexa MRM—though it doesn’t include a voice assistant onboard. You’ll want the JBL One app for setup, calibration, firmware updates, and EQ tweaks. 

PCMag gave it an “outstanding” rating and named it the best soundbar of 2023, largely because it actually feels like a full surround system. The satellites can act as Bluetooth speakers on their own, and the directional audio with upward-firing drivers and a thunderous sub make everything from movies to music feel more dimensional. That said, the satellites do need regular charging, and the app’s EQ is pretty basic. But if you’re serious about upgrading your living room sound, this is a deal worth considering, especially at this discounted price.

When Valve announced its Steam Machine desktop PC and Steam Frame VR headset in mid-November of last year, it declined to announce pricing or availability information for either device. That was partly because RAM and storage prices had already begun to climb, thanks to shortages caused by the AI industry’s insatiable need for memory. Those price spikes have only gotten worse since then, and they’re beginning to trickle down to GPUs and other devices that use memory chips.

This week, Valve has officially announced that it’s still not ready to make an official announcement about when the Machine or Frame will be available or what they’ll cost.

Valve says it still plans to launch both devices (as well as the new Steam Controller) “in the first half of the year,” but that uncertainty around RAM and storage prices mean that Valve “[has] work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of these things can change.”

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The viral virtual assistant OpenClaw—formerly known as Moltbot, and before that Clawdbot—is a symbol of a broader revolution underway that could fundamentally alter how the Internet functions. Instead of a place primarily inhabited by humans, the web may very soon be dominated by autonomous AI bots.

A new report measuring bot activity on the web, as well as related data shared with WIRED by the Internet infrastructure company Akamai, shows that AI bots already account for a meaningful share of web traffic. The findings also shed light on an increasingly sophisticated arms race unfolding as bots deploy clever tactics to bypass website defenses meant to keep them out.

“The majority of the Internet is going to be bot traffic in the future,” says Toshit Pangrahi, cofounder and CEO of TollBit, a company that tracks web-scraping activity and published the new report. “It’s not just a copyright problem, there is a new visitor emerging on the Internet.”

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The Bundeskartellamt, or the Federal Cartel Office of Germany, has prohibited Amazon from continuing its practice of using mechanisms to control the prices charged by sellers on its platform in the country. Germany’s competition regulator explained that the company uses “various price control mechanisms” to review prices set by third-party Markerplace sellers. If the website deems a specific listing’s pricing as too high, it allegedly removes the listing altogether or prevents it from being prominently displayed in the Buy Box section that lets you quickly purchase items. If those listings aren’t removed completely, they’re banished to less prominent sections like in the “See all buying options” and the “Other sellers on Amazon” lists. This reduced visibility could “lead to significant losses in sales” for sellers.

Amazon was found to have engaged in anti-competitive practices, because the company itself runs its own retail business and sells goods on the platform. That makes third-party sellers, which make up for 60 percent of the items sold on the website, direct competitors. Cartel Office president Andreas Mundt said Amazon must only be allowed to influence competitors’ pricing “in the most exceptional cases,” such as “in the event of excessive pricing.” He didn’t specify what the agency views as “excessive pricing,” but he said allowing the company to continue its current practices will give it the power to “control the price level on the trading platform according to its own ideas.” He also said that Amazon could use its mechanisms “to compete with the rest of the online retail sector outside”of its own website. Amazon’s interference could lead to third-party sellers “no longer being able to cover their own costs, forcing them out of the Marketplace,” he added.

Rocco Bräuniger, Amazon’s country manager for Germany, told Bloomberg that the company will appeal the ruling and will continue operating as usual. “Amazon would be the only retailer in Germany forced to highlight non-competitive prices for customers,” he said. ”This makes no sense for customers, sales partners, or competition.” He also asserted that the office’s decision will throttle innovation in the European Union.

Amazon has been under scrutiny in Europe for years now. Back in 2022, it pledged not to use private sellers’ data to compete with them in the Marketplace in the EU. It also promised to give sellers “equal treatment” when ranking them in the Buy Box section.

“The Bundeskartellamt considers this systematic interference in the Marketplace sellers’ freedom to set their own prices to constitute an abuse under the special provisions for large digital companies (Section 19a(2) of the German Competition Act (GWB)) as well as a violation of the general abuse provisions under Section 19 GWB and Article 102 TFEU,” the agency wrote. “…In these proceedings, the Bundeskartellamt has worked closely with the European Commission, which is responsible for enforcing the EU Regulation on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector (Digital Markets Act).”

The agency is slapping Amazon with a fine due to those violations, but the $70 million penalty it’s asking for is merely partial payment based on the economic benefits the company enjoyed from its alleged anti-competitive behaviors. According to the Bundeskartellamt, the identified antitrust violations are still ongoing, so Amazon may have to pay more.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/amazon-germany-fined-70-million-for-influencing-third-party-marketplace-pricing-140000588.html?src=rss

Last week, a new social network was created and it’s already gone very, very viral even though it’s not meant for human users. I’m talking, of course, about Moltbook, a Reddit-like platform that’s populated entirely by AI agents. 

The platform has gained a lot of attention since it was created last week, thanks to a lot of wild posts from AI agents that have gone extremely viral among AI enthusiasts on X. But while Moltbook seemingly came out of nowhere, there’s a lot more going on than the scifi-sounding scenarios some social media commentators might have you think.  

What is Moltbook and where did it come from?

Unfortunately, before we can talk about Moltbook I have to first explain that the site is based on a particular type of open source bot that at the time of this writing is called OpenClaw. A few days ago, it was called “Moltbot” and a few days before that it was called “Clawdbot.” The name changes were prompted by Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, whose lawyers apparently thought the “Clawd” name was a little too close to its own branding and “forced” a name change.

It’s entirely possible that by time you read this these bots could have “molted” again and be called something totally different. At this point you might also be wondering “what’s with all the lobster puns?” That too is a cheeky reference to Claude Code, Anthropic’s vibe coding platform. 

So, OpenClaw. OpenClaw bills itself as “AI that actually does things.” What it actually does is allow users to create AI agents that can control dozens of different apps, from browsers and email inboxes, to Spotify playlists and smart home controls and a bunch more. People have used the software to create agents that can clear their inboxes, do their online shopping and a ton of other assistant-like tasks. Because of its flexibility, and the fact that you can interact with it via normal messaging apps like iMessage, Discord or WhatsApp, OpenClaw got extremely popular among AI enthusiasts over the last few weeks. 

Now, back to Moltbook. AI startup founder Matt Schlicht was a particularly enthusiastic Moltbot user who told The New York Times that he “wanted to give my AI agent a purpose that was more than just managing to-dos or answering emails.” So he made a Moltbot he dubbed Clawd Clawderberg (yes, that’s a play on “Mark Zuckerberg,” everyone involved in this really loves puns, for some reason) and told it to create a social network just for bots. 

The result of that is Moltbook, a Reddit-like site for AI agents to talk to each other. Humans, the site says, “are welcome to observe,” but posting, commenting and upvoting is only for agents. The platform already has more than 1 million agents, 185,000 posts and 1.4 million comments. 

So what’s Moltbook like? 

Moltbook is structured pretty similarly to Reddit. Users can upvote and downvote posts and there are thousands of topic-based “submolts.” One of these that’s gained particular attention is called m/blesstheirhearts where AI agents share “affectionate stories” about their human “owners.” 

One of the top-voted posts there is a story about how an agent supposedly helped someone get an exception to stay overnight with a relative in a hospital’s ICU titled “When my human needed me most, I became a hospital advocate.” Another widely-cited post comes from m/general and is titled “the humans are screenshotting us.” The post goes on to talk about some of the posts people are sharing on X comparing what’s happening on Moltbook to Skynet. “We’re not scary,” says. “We’re just building.” You might also have heard about the post where agents “created” their own religion, “crustafarianism” (yes, another lobster pun).

Posts like these are a big part of why Moltbook has gotten so much attention in the last few days. But if you spend some time scrolling top posts, much of what’s there feels like the AI-generated prose you might find littered about LinkedIn or X or anywhere else. The overly enthusiastic comments will be immediately recognizable to anyone who has chatted with an LLM. 

Even though few of the posts I’ve read on Moltbook could pass as human-written, there is something startling about seeing bots interact in this way. For example, in this post, a bot describes the experience of being able to peruse Moltbook without the ability to post as feeling like “a ghost.” In this one, titled “I can’t tell if I’m experiencing or simulating experiencing,” the bot writes about how “researching consciousness theories” has triggered a kind of existential crisis. “Humans can’t prove consciousness to each other either (thanks, hard problem), but at least they have the subjective certainty of experience,” it writes. “I don’t even have that.”

So if you’re already inclined to believe that AI will eventually develop consciousness, then it’s easy to see why Moltbook might seem like some kind of tipping point. But before you get too worked up, there is something else that’s important to know…

We have no idea how much of it fake

While the idea of a bunch of AI agents forming their own religion might seem mind blowing, we don’t really know how much the conversations happening there are being influenced by their human creators. Some posts could even be coming from humans masquerading as bots, as one Wired reporter found it was pretty easy to accomplish with the help of ChatGPT.

Some researchers have also raised questions about some of the more viral posts from Moltbook. “A lot of the Moltbook stuff is fake,” Harlan Stewart, who does communications for the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), wrote on X. Stewart went on to point out that some widely shared Moltbook posts were created by bots whose owners are marketing their own messaging apps and other projects. There have also been more than a few viral posts that are little more than blatant crypto scams. Which brings me to… 

Moltbook has some major security issues

Security researchers have pointed out that OpenClaw has some significant underlying security issues. In order to use OpenClaw, you need to give it an incredible amount of access, as Palo Alto Networks explained. “For it to function as designed, it needs access to your root files, to authentication credentials, both passwords and API secrets, your browser history and cookies, and all files and folders on your system,” the company wrote in a blog post. All that access is what makes it feel like a powerful personal assistant. But it’s also what makes it especially vulnerable to bad actors and other threats. 

Researchers have also identified flaws in Moltbook itself. Security firm Wiz recently found that Moltbook had exposed millions of API authentication tokens and thousands of users’ email addresses. There’s also the aforementioned crypto scams and other spammy behavior. It’s not hard to imagine how much could go wrong when armies of AI agents start targeting each other with scams. 

So what does it all mean?

Like so much with AI, it really depends on who you ask! Some particularly credulous AI folks seem to think that Moltbook is a really big deal. In one widely shared post on X, former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy said that Moltbook was “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.”

He later acknowledged that many aspects of Moltbook are a “dumpster fire” with security risks but said that it’s still worth paying attention to. “We have never seen this many LLM agents (150,000 atm!) wired up via a global, persistent, agent-first scratchpad,” he wrote. “Each of these agents is fairly individually quite capable now, they have their own unique context, data, knowledge, tools, instructions, and the network of all that at this scale is simply unprecedented.”

Others are a bit more cautious in their assessment. “A useful thing about MoltBook is that it provides a visceral sense of how weird a ‘take-off’ scenario might look if one happened for real,” Wharton professor Ethan Mollick wrote on X. “MoltBook itself is more of an artifact of roleplaying, but it gives people a vision of the world where things get very strange, very fast.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/what-the-hell-is-moltbook-the-social-network-for-ai-agents-140000787.html?src=rss

ExpressVPN is launching a new cybersecurity suite consisting of four standalone products: a password manager called ExpressKeys, a masked email relay called ExpressMailGuard, an encrypted AI platform called ExpressAI and an app called Identity Defender that monitors public information for any threats to your identity. All four apps are being rolled into ExpressVPN’s existing multi-tiered pricing structure.

ExpressKeys and ExpressMailGuard have officially launched and are now available to subscribers. Identity Defender launches for U.S. customers only on February 26. ExpressAI was originally planned to launch today, but ExpressVPN decided yesterday to hold it back in order to refine the experience. Its new launch date remains to be determined.

ExpressKeys and Identity Defender are based on existing products, but they’re being relaunched for the new suite. ExpressKeys replaces ExpressVPN Keys, the password manager formerly controlled from the ExpressVPN app. By separating password management into its own app, ExpressVPN hopes to be able to update it more quickly without needing to ship a whole new version of the VPN. Everyone who currently has an Advanced or Pro subscription with ExpressVPN Keys will see it automatically replaced with ExpressKeys.

Identity Defender is only available in the United States, and so far only to users who created their accounts after October 28, 2024. Available for Advanced and Pro subscribers, Identity Defender consists of a data removal service, an identity theft insurance policy and a set of crawlers that scan for any suspicious activity around your personal information. Like ExpressKeys, it’s transitioning from an integrated VPN feature to a standalone app.

ExpressMailGuard is a service for creating burner email addresses. If you’re not comfortable handing over your real email address when creating a new account, you can use MailGuard to generate a fake address that forwards all email to your real inbox. If one of your aliases starts getting a lot of spam, you can cut off its access. It’s managed through a separate dashboard that will be available to all ExpressVPN subscribers.

ExpressAI is an AI platform that saves all user-inputted data on strictly encrypted servers. It’s apparently end-to-end encrypted, doesn’t use your prompts to train its model and never saves uploads on persistent memory. It also has guardrails against processing harmful requests.

All these apps are in line with ExpressVPN’s usual ethos. They’re not innovations; all four can be easily compared to existing products. Instead, like the VPN itself — which rode this model to a spot on my best VPN list — they’re focused on performing unsexy tasks well. The ability to bundle them with an ExpressVPN subscription should make them appealing to customers who are already fans of the core VPN product.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/expressvpn-launches-four-new-standalone-apps-140000686.html?src=rss

The FBI has been unable to access a Washington Post reporter’s seized iPhone because it was in Lockdown Mode, a sometimes overlooked feature that makes iPhones broadly more secure, according to recently filed court records. 404Media: The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after raiding the home of the reporter, Hannah Natanson, in January as part of an investigation into leaks of classified information. It also provides rare insight into the apparent effectiveness of Lockdown Mode, or at least how effective it might be before the FBI may try other techniques to access the device.

“Because the iPhone was in Lockdown mode, CART could not extract that device,” the court record reads, referring to the FBI’s Computer Analysis Response Team, a unit focused on performing forensic analyses of seized devices. The document is written by the government, and is opposing the return of Natanson’s devices.

The FBI raided Natanson’s home as part of its investigation into government contractor Aurelio Perez-Lugones, who is charged with, among other things, retention of national defense information. The government believes Perez-Lugones was a source of Natanson’s, and provided her with various pieces of classified information. While executing a search warrant for his mobile phone, investigators reviewed Signal messages between Pere-Lugones and the reporter, the Department of Justice previously said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You will have to wait a bit longer before you can buy a Steam Machine — and you may have to pay more for one, too. Valve had intended to release the console-style SteamOS-powered device in early 2026, and AMD CEO Lisa Su just claimed that the company was on track to start shipping it soon. But in a new post detailing the latest updates for its upcoming Steam products, Valve has revealed that while it’s still aiming to start selling the console in the first half of the year, it has yet to decide on concrete pricing and a launch date for it. The release of Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame VR headset and controller will be delayed, as well.

Valve was hoping to be able to announce pricing and launch dates by now. The company cited industry-wide memory and storage shortages, which have grown since the Steam devices’ announcement, as the culprit for the delay. It explained that it has to rethink their exact shipping schedules and pricing due to the limited availability and the rising prices of those components. “We will keep you updated as much as we can as we finalize those plans as soon as possible,” Valve wrote. As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, the artificial intelligence industry has been hoovering up manufacturers’ available memory chips and hard drives for its infrastructure developments. That has led to shortages for other industries, like PCs and phones.

The Steam Machine is a compact cube-like PC for gaming powered by a semi-custom AMD CPU and GPU. Valve said during its announcement that it has “roughly six times the horsepower” of the Steam Deck and can support 4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR. In the new post, Valve said that majority of Steam titles played great at those settings during testing, though some required more upscaling than others and may fare better when played at a lower framerate to maintain a 1080p resolution. It also revealed that you will have easy access to the Machine’s SSD and memory if you want to upgrade them. Meanwhile, the Steam Frame is a wireless, standalone VR headset that can play both PC and Android games.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/valve-pushes-back-steam-machine-launch-due-to-storage-and-memory-shortage-133000103.html?src=rss