from the pie-in-the-sky dept

Last month, SpaceX began making lobbying filings in support of phone unlocking rules making it easier to switch your phone between wireless providers. You might recall that the Biden FCC was on the cusp of installing such rules before the Trump administration, hand in hand with giant telecoms, dismantled them (Trump’s FCC will have to decide whether they love Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile or Elon Musk more).

SpaceX’s push now makes a little more sense with the company saying it is “considering” launching a Starlink retail product and could eventually build its own terrestrial US mobile network:

“The company’s president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, told investors during a recent IPO roadshow that the group was considering launching a Starlink retail product and could build its own terrestrial US mobile network, according to four people familiar with the matter.”

To be clear, I think a lot of this is simply more bullshit to justify the insane SpaceX IPO valuation. But the fact SpaceX has lobbied for phone unlocking rules suggests there is at least some kernel of real curiosity about an actual plan.

One major problem for SpaceX and Starlink is that Starlink is already too congested to handle the traffic they currently deal with. They’re already struggling under the load of 10 million low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite users; the idea, as proposed in their IPO prospectus, that they’ll very quickly surge to more than 300 million subscribers was already the stuff of fantasy.

But when it comes to building out a cellular network to reach that goal, they simply don’t have the spectrum for this kind of thing:

“New Street Research estimates that the three US mobile network operators have a total of about 1,020MHz of spectrum, while SpaceX has just 65MHz.”

Building out telecom networks is a massive, costly, and expensive chore. Even when you own a government. Directly threatening AT&T and Verizon — some of the most politically powerful companies in the country — wouldn’t be a cake walk, even for Musk. And while Musk clearly has influence at the FCC (remember that time he got Brendan Carr to launch a fake investigation to acquire more spectrum?), turning Starlink into a full wireless/cellular/satellite carrier would be very slow and very expensive.

So if you were a logic-driven investor you’d likely and correctly view this as a costly money pit with no returns anywhere on the horizon. The only real way to make it work would be to acquire somebody like T-Mobile, which would cost billions, take years to integrate, and face all sorts of operational and political challenges — especially if the economy is going to break (further) or control of Congress shifts.

So while a Starlink jump into wireless is certainly possible, I think it’s more likely that this is just putting a toe in the water in a way that might help them extract more favorable terms from their existing cellular partners (they currently offer an “out of range” option via T-Mobile). It’s also likely more IPO fluffing by people who know U.S. journalists and investors no longer truly inhabit operational reality.

Filed Under: cellular, competition, congestion, elon musk, fcc, phone unlocking, satellite, telecom, wireless

Companies: spacex, starlink

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The MYNT3D 3D Printing Pen is a handheld creative tool that allows users to draw in three dimensions using heated plastic filament. Instead of printing from a machine, this pen lets you manually create 3D objects by extruding melted plastic that quickly hardens. It uses FDM technology similar to 3D printers and is designed for applications like crafting, prototyping, and artistic modeling. The kit includes the pen, PLA filament, and a power adapter, making it ready to use out of the box. Its main features include adjustable temperature control, allowing precise material handling for different effects and variable speed control for smoother, more accurate drawing. It also has an OLED display for monitoring settings and a slim, ergonomic design for comfortable use during extended sessions. It’s on sale for $40.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

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After two contrasting group-stage campaigns, Switzerland and Algeria will now meet in a round-of-32 World Cup 2026 clash in Vancouver.

Switzerland’s road to the knockouts has been relatively smooth. Since conceding a late equalizer to Qatar, Murat Yakin’s men bossed Bosnia and Herzegovina 4-1 before beating co-hosts Canada 2-1 in their final group-stage match. Johan Manzambi has three goals and an assist, despite starting the tournament on the bench, and the 20-year-old Newcastle target will likely again be the Nati’s prime goal threat. Granit Xhaka will lead by example in midfield.

A visit by iFixit to one of China’s large battery production sites offers a rare look at how replacement batteries for iPhones actually get finished and tested. The team captured the work on video, showing lead teardown technician Shahram Mokhtari walking through the final assembly steps that turn a bare lithium-polymer cell into a complete, safe pack ready for installation.

The facility operates on a massive scale, manufacturing approximately 13 million battery cells per month. These cells begin life as a stack of dozens of ultra-thin layers that are sealed to extremely tight tolerances, ensuring that the chemistry inside remains stable and efficient throughout years of continuous use. Quality control tests are performed at each stage to detect any potential problems that could affect capacity, heat buildup, or long-term reliability, down to the smallest details that can make a significant difference.

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When a finished cell reaches the assembly area, the true integration begins. Rows of blank battery management system boards, or BMS boards, are waiting to be programmed. A machine places a contact pin into each board and applies the firmware that protects the cell from damage. That software protects the battery from overcharging or overdischarge, monitors the temperature, and delivers correct health data to the phone. Without it, even raw cells cannot be trusted to function securely within an iPhone.

The next step is attachment, which involves a machine pressing a programmed BMS board and its flexible cable onto the bare cell extremely nicely. It’s critical that the connection is solid but small, as any misalignment at this step could come back to get you later when the battery needs to fit into an iPhone. Folding follows, with workers or machines folding the BMS board down twice to fit snuggly against the cell. The edges are wrapped with Kapton tape to prevent any exposed contacts from contacting and causing a short, and the sticker machine applies a little label that folds back on itself to keep the board in place and from shifting during handling or installation.

Now it’s time to remove the protective films that were applied to both sides of the cell during early manufacture. Those films have kept the surfaces pristine up until now. Removing them prepares the battery for the adhesive strips that will keep it securely in place within the iPhone case. Quality control must be nearly excellent at this time. A testing machine takes the battery through a variety of checks, including impedance, capacity, and overcurrent tests, and returns a simple pass or fail result. A pass indicates that the battery is in good working order and will behave as expected in a genuine device, whereas failed batteries are removed.

Mohktari then plugs the finished battery with a diagnostic tool. The screen displays all of the live data obtained directly from the BMS, such as the current charge level, condition of health, temperature, design capacity, and actual maximum capacity. It’s all the proof you need to know the battery will function correctly, just like a fresh new pack in a phone. The final step in preparation is to apply the adhesive pull strips that Apple uses to secure batteries inside iPhones. Those strips allow technicians to cleanly remove the old battery during a repair and secure the new one without adding excessive bulk. To ensure that everything works properly, the completed battery is inserted into an actual iPhone, which switches on without a hitch, demonstrating that the pack works from start to finish. Every step up to that point has been taken to ensure that the last bit happens as planned.

Anthropic says Claude Fable 5 won’t be accessible via Claude subscriptions after July 7, but it’s not a permanent change, and the company expects the model to return outside the usage-based plan soon.

Fable 5 was recently restored after the US government lifted export controls on Anthropic’s most powerful models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

As part of the redeployment, Anthropic said Fable 5 would be available globally on Claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and the Claude Platform.

However, Anthropic has restricted Claude Fable usage due to high demand, and plans to move the model to usage-based billing next week.

“For Pro, Max, Team, and select Enterprise plans, Fable 5 will be included for up to 50% of weekly usage limits through July 7, after which it will be available via usage credits,” Anthropic said in its original blog post.

That line led to concerns that Fable 5, Anthropic’s most powerful model, was becoming a permanent pay-to-play upgrade for regular Claude users.

However, a Claude Code lead engineer has now clarified that Fable is expected to return to subscriptions once Anthropic has enough capacity.

“I’ve heard a lot of questions about Fable’s availability on subscription plans,” the engineer wrote in a post on X. “While it will come off subscriptions after July 7th, we aim to restore Fable as a standard part of our subscriptions as soon as capacity allows, as we mentioned in our original blog post.”

Anthropic says Fable 5 demand is difficult to predict

In its announcement, Anthropic said it expects demand for Fable 5 to be “very high, and difficult to predict.”

The company said Fable 5 is fully available today on the Claude API and consumption-based Enterprise plans, but access on subscription plans is being handled more conservatively.

“For subscription plans, we’d rather give access sooner than later, so we’re rolling out more conservatively, in stages,” Anthropic said.

Anthropic also said that after the included subscription window ends, it aims to restore Fable 5 as a standard part of subscription plans “when sufficient capacity allows us to do so.”

For now, Claude users who rely on Fable 5 should expect usage-credit billing after the deadline, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

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Claude Fable, the company’s most powerful model, is now available to all users, but early impressions are disappointing, as it appears to be nowhere near the original release.

When the Department of Commerce announced that it was lifting the ban on Claude Fable, I was holding my breath and counting seconds for the model to show up on Claude Code. I had also loaded up my usage-based credit wallet, just in case the model debuted as strictly usage-based.

To our surprise, Claude Fable shipped for everyone, including those with a $100 Max subscription, but there are multiple restrictions.

According to Anthropic, while Fable 5 is included in Max, Pro, and Team plans, it is heavily capped.

For example, you can use Fable for up to 50% of your weekly usage limits, which is not significant for such a powerful model. But it’ll get worse after July 7, as the model will transition entirely to a pay-to-play system via usage credits.

However, the real gut punch is the degraded performance, or as famously used in the AI community, the “nerfed” performance.

On Reddit, users are reporting that the restored Fable 5 feels weaker, or is simply being routed through stricter safety systems more often than before.

“The new guardrails are kicking in on way too many tasks and falling back to Opus 4.8,” one user wrote in a Reddit post. “This is not the model that got banned.”

The problem is not just limited to Claude desktop, as Claude Code is also struggling with similar issues.

One user said Fable “didn’t even let me search for dead code without switching to Opus,” while another said it was “very very obvious” when the fallback triggers because Claude tells the user and visibly shifts to Opus.

Another developer claimed the model was unusable for some systems-level coding work, saying that C, C++, Rust, Win32 API references, memory-related work, and files mentioning words like “security,” “vulnerable,” “unsafe,” or “hook” appeared to trigger a fallback or block.

Fable 5 may still be powerful when it actually handles the task, but the restored version appears to be far more sensitive to prompts, project files, and security-adjacent language.

However, BleepingComputer understands that the model itself has not been nerfed. Instead, it is likely that Anthropic is being extra careful with the safety guardrails, which is negatively affecting Fable’s daily use cases.

In fact, we observed that Fable is sometimes routed to Opus 4.8 even when the task does not appear to be a safety risk.

Anthropic has said that its updated safeguards rely on a large “safety margin,” which could explain the subpar experience some users are seeing with Fable.

Anthropic hasn’t acknowledged the reports of false positives yet, but it’s likely the company is aware of the problem and will address it in a future update.

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from the swiss-slapp-suits dept

Earlier this year we wrote about the ridiculous thin-skinned executives at Palantir suing a small independent Swiss online magazine, Republik, that had reported on the great lengths the company had gone to, trying to get the Swiss government to purchase Palantir’s surveillance technology. Palantir knew they couldn’t sue for defamation because, you know, everything Republik reported was true. Instead, they sued, trying to invoke a Swiss “right of reply” law, claiming that because Republik refused to publish the press release Palantir wanted to run in response to the reporting, the magazine had violated the law.

As we said at the time, this is the height of entitlement. Palantir doesn’t get to tell Republik how and what it must publish.

And, thankfully, a court has agreed. Zurich’s commercial court rejected 22 of 23 claims that Palantir made.

The data analytics company lost on 22 out of 23 counts of the suit. In a ruling on Friday, Zurich’s commercial court dismissed the majority of counterstatement requests filed by the company and its Swiss subsidiary finding that only a single passage in one article warranted a published response from the company.

While the court agrees that there is a “right of reply” law in Switzerland, it has limitations:

While Swiss media law allows the subjects of a story to request a right of reply, this has caveats: the right of reply has to be concise and stick to the facts of the story.

The one count that stuck: the court found that a single passage in just one article warranted a limited published reply from Palantir.

Also, the court told Palantir to pay Republik for its legal expenses wasted on this SLAPP suit:

The court on Friday ordered Palantir to bear 95% of the 9,000 Swiss francs ($11,300; £8,400) court costs and to pay Republik 9,900 francs in legal expenses.

Of course, this case was always less about the ‘right of reply’ than about making it clear to anyone who reports critically on Palantir that the company will go to war with them, seeking any legal theory, no matter how ridiculous, to tie them up in court — the textbook logic of a SLAPP suit. Republik has said that defending the case cost the small organization quite a lot in time and resources:

Balz Oertli, a journalist with WAV research collective, said: “We invested a great deal of effort into this case, and we are very pleased with the outcome.”

Anyway, given that Palantir seems really upset about Republik’s reporting, it sure would be a shame if you decided to go read this critical reporting of Palantir’s relentless attempts to win business from the Swiss government.

Filed Under: chilling effects, free speech, right of reply, switzerland

Companies: palantir, republik