It's official: The FBI's warrantless searches of communications seized to protect US national security have at last been ruled unconstitutional and in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

In a major December ruling made public this week, US District Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall settled one of the biggest debates about feared government overreach that has prompted calls to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for more than a decade.

Critics' primary concern was whether the FBI needed a warrant to search and query Americans' communications that are often incidentally, inadvertently, or mistakenly seized during investigations of suspected foreign terrorists.

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has revived three complaints against broadcast stations accused of bias against President Donald Trump.

Outgoing Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel last week directed the FCC to dismiss the complaints against CBS, ABC, and NBC stations, along with a fourth complaint about Fox, in what she called a stand for the First Amendment. Rosenworcel said the "threat to the First Amendment has taken on new forms, as the incoming President has called on the Federal Communications Commission to revoke licenses for broadcast television stations because he disagrees with their content and coverage."

But in three orders issued yesterday, the FCC Enforcement Bureau reversed the CBS, ABC, and NBC decisions. "We find that the previous order was issued prematurely based on an insufficient investigatory record for the station-specific conduct at issue," each new order said. "We therefore conclude that this complaint requires further consideration."

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Although fans of A Song of Ice and Fire might still be hankering for the long-delayed next book in the series, bestselling sci-fi/fantasy author George R.R. Martin has instead added a different item to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics paper just published in the American Journal of Physics that he co-authored. The paper derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictional virus that is the centerpiece of the Wild Cards series of books, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with some 44 authors contributing.

Wild Cards grew out of the Superworld RPG, specifically a long-running campaign game-mastered by Martin in the 1980s, with several of the original sci-fi writers who contributed to the series participating. (A then-unknown Neil Gaiman once pitched Martin a Wild Cards story involving a main character who lived in a world of dreams. Martin rejected the pitch, and Gaiman's idea became The Sandman .) Initially, Martin planned to write a novel centered on his character Turtle, but he then decided it would be better as a shared universe anthology. Martin thought that superhero comics had far too many sources of the many different superpowers and wanted his universe to have one single source. Snodgrass suggested a virus.

The series is basically an alternate history of the US in the aftermath of World War II. An airborne alien virus, designed to rewrite DNA, had been released over New York City in 1946 and spread globally, infecting tens of thousands worldwide. It's called the Wild Card virus because it affects every individual differently. It kills 90 percent of those it infects and mutates the rest. Nine percent of the latter end up with unpleasant conditions—these people are called Jokers—while 1 percent develop superpowers and are known as Aces. Some Aces have "powers" that are so trivial and useless that they are known as "deuces."

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On Tuesday, OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX announced plans to form Stargate, a new company that will invest $500 billion in AI computing infrastructure across the United States over four years. The announcement came during a White House meeting with President Donald Trump, who called it the "largest AI infrastructure project in history."

However, the origins of the Stargate project extend back to 2024 , prior to Trump beginning his second term in office, and skeptics have begun to take aim at the numbers announced.

OpenAI says the goal of Stargate is to kickstart building more data centers to expand computing capacity for current and future AI projects, including OpenAI's goal of "AGI," which the company defines as a highly autonomous AI system that "outperforms humans at most economically valuable work."

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The UK’s competition watchdog has launched an investigation into Apple's and Google’s mobile platforms, just days after the government forced out its chair as part of a push to cut the regulatory burden on business.

The Competition and Markets Authority said on Thursday it would examine whether the creators of the iPhone and Android smartphone operating systems should be subjected to extra scrutiny over how they run their mobile platforms, in its second investigation under the new digital markets regime.

The announcement comes just two days after the government ousted Marcus Bokkerink as chair of the CMA, amid concerns the regulator was not sufficiently focused on growth.

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Now 11 seasons in, Formula E has come a long way from its sometimes-chaotic early days and those mid-race pitstops to change cars. Car swaps went away a long time ago, but when the series gets back to racing next month in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the mid-race pit stop will be back. Except this time, the cars will be quickly recharged by powerful 600 kW fast chargers.

The new race feature, which Formula E is calling "pit boost," is a 30-second pitstop, during which time the car receives a 600 kW fast charge—more than twice as much power as a Tesla Supercharger—that adds 10 percent (3.85 kWh) to the battery's state of charge. It's mandatory for every car in the race, but a team is only allowed to charge one of its two cars at a time, and only within a specified window of time during the race.

Some people are probably going to be unimpressed with the length of the stops—while they're shorter than you might see at a prototype stop at Le Mans or Daytona, you also won't see mechanics running around changing tires. We're also talking an order of magnitude longer than a current Formula 1 pitstop, which will no doubt be used as ammunition by Formula E's detractors, just as the lap-time comparisons are.

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The Cadillac Lyriq was the first of a new breed of General Motors' electric vehicles. Built around a common battery platform ( which used to be called Ultium ), the midsize SUV has been on sale for about three years now, and for model year 2026, there's a new version available, the first Cadillac EV to wear the V-series badge.

"V-Series captures the spirit of Cadillac, embodying our relentless pursuit of engineering excellence through our racing and production vehicles," said John Roth, vice president of Global Cadillac. "LYRIQ-V takes this commitment a step further in the EV era, pushing our performance pedigree of V-Series to new heights with a powerful, personalized and high-tech driving experience that fits perfectly into our customers' lives," Roth said.

As with other Cadillac V-series cars, you can expect a much higher power output than the base models. In this case, that's a hefty 615 hp (459 kW) and 650 lb-ft (880 Nm)—not quite double the output of the single-motor Lyriq we drove back in 2023. The Lyriq-V uses a pair of motors to achieve that output, powered by the same 102 kWh battery pack as in the normal Lyriq.

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The US Space Force's Space Systems Command announced Friday it has ordered eight launches from SpaceX in the first batch of dozens of missions the military will buy in a new phase of competition for lucrative national security launch contracts.

The eight launches are divided into two fixed-price "task orders" that Space System Command opened up for bids earlier this year. One covers seven launches with groups of spacecraft for the Space Development Agency's constellation of missile tracking and data relay satellites. The other task order is a single mission for the National Reconnaissance Office, the US government's spy satellite agency.

Two eligible bidders

The parameters of the competition limited the bidders to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA). SpaceX won both task orders for a combined value of $733.5 million, or roughly $91.7 million per mission. All the missions will launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, beginning as soon as late 2025.

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It is a matter of settled law on the Judge John Hodgman podcast that people like what they like, and you can't force someone to like something. It is called the Tom Waits Principle.

I thought about that principle constantly while I was trying to open myself up to MechWarrior 5: Clans . Trying to jump into this game and like it, so that I'd have some critical assessment of it, was akin to handing a friend The Black Rider and assuming they would come back begging for more.

From everything I can tell and what I have read, this game largely delivers on the simulation, and notably a lot of the story, that BattleTech / MechWarrior fans revere. Clans seems very good at what it sets out to do, and I do get the sense that it is relatively accommodating to newcomers compared to other entries. It just did not, despite its stand-alone nature and alleged newcomer friendliness, convert me into a loadout tactician or stomp-and-shoot enthusiast.

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