from the too-bad,-so-sad dept

Back in June, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission that federal limits on coordinated expenditures by political parties violate the First Amendment. Which is every bit as stupid and corrupt as it sounds.

Previously, under the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), political parties were subjected to strict statutory caps on how much money they could spend in direct coordination with their candidates’ campaigns. The Supreme Court’s June ruling eliminated candidate contribution caps, made it much easier for rich people to flood Joint Fundraising Committees (JFCs) with cash, and basically gave a giant green light for more quid-pro quo corruption to be exploited by dark money groups.

Given the broad disparity in how much money the two U.S. parties have ($125 million for the GOP versus a bunch of debt for the mismanaged DNC) Republicans were keen to use the Supreme Court ruling to their advantage in the coming midterms, hoping to flood the airwaves with more dark money-funded agitprop than ever before in a bid to try and offset Donald Trump’s nose-diving popularity.

Hoping to embolden their plan and provide discounts, the Brendan Carr FCC’s media bureau quietly issued an announcement late last March saying they were making some changes to the FCC’s lowest unit charge (LUC) requirements governing broadcast TV political ads. The changes expanded which political entities qualified for discounted broadcast advertising rates.

Historically, a subset of political candidates were given a discounted rate on ads starting 60 days before the midterms (generally the lowest rate any advertiser has to pay during that block of time). The Supreme Court and FCC collaborated to extend that discount to effectively all dark money political groups and JFCs, giving the GOP a massive advantage in midterm messaging and spending.

But things have since gotten slightly more complicated for Republicans.

Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic Commissioner (because Republicans refuse to fill the other empty Democrat seat), issued a statement this week belatedly blasting the Carr FCC for expediting America’s steady decline at the hand of billionaire donors and political corruption:

“In the final stretch of a national election, this FCC is unleashing a flood of coordinated
campaign money into broadcast advertising, just as the Supreme Court has cleared the way
for unlimited coordinated spending between parties and candidates. This unprecedented,
last-minute decision gives the biggest political spenders an even bigger advantage over
everyone else by expanding the candidate-only discount established by law to joint
fundraising and party committees, an advantage that will make it hard for anyone else to
catch up before Election Day.

According to Gomez, Carr’s FCC also made the changes with all the transparency you might expect:

This decision was made behind closed doors by agency staff, not by the full Commission, and it contradicts what this administration itself told the Supreme Court less than a year ago about who qualifies for this discount. In direct conflict with the administration’s position, the FCC relies on alleged staff-level guidance that was never provided in writing and that nobody could find, and adopted it with no opportunity for the public to weigh in. The American people should not have sweeping election-year rule changes forced on them in the dark, on the eve of an election, without a single opportunity for public input.

But there’s some new bad news for Brendan Carr and the Republican midterm agitprop machine: Sen. Jon Ossoff, Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet and Senate candidates Roy Cooper and Sherrod Brown filed a lawsuit last June attempting to stop the FCC. And this week, The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th Circuit Court of Appeals sided 2-1 with the four Democrats, temporarily suspending the FCC effort:

“The [lowest unit charge] requirement and campaign finance statutes are clear that neither political parties nor joint fundraising committees with non-candidate members can be entitled to the LUC.”

The court found that the Carr FCC also basically ignored numerous complaints by broadcasters and politicians about the unfairness of the discounted ad rate plan:

“Despite the time-sensitive nature of these proceedings, the Commission intentionally took no action and offered no response to the Application for more than three months. The Commission did not, for example, seek responses from impacted parties, or engage in fact finding, or secure supplemental briefing, or solicit public comment, or schedule or conduct an oral argument.”

Funny, that.

Republicans will inevitably appeal. Though the Republican effort to get highly discounted rates for their midterm agitprop campaigns has stalled out at an inopportune time (for them). But overall, the general direction of U.S. lobbying and corruption safeguards generally has only been headed one direction, with fairly ugly and obvious results everywhere you look.

Filed Under: advertising, airtime, anna gomez, brendan carr, broadcasters, corruption, dark money, fcc, jon ossoff, kristen mcdonald rivet, lowest unit charge, midterms, political advertising, politics, proaganda, roy cooper, sherrod brown, tv

This has been another year in which we’ve seen a significant number of streaming price hikes, and Apple has become the latest company to bump up costs for subscribers in the US. On Friday, the tech giant announced it’s raising the price of Apple TV’s monthly and annual subscriptions, as well as the Apple One Individual plan.

As of today, Apple TV will increase by $2 to $15 per month, and the annual price will increase by $20 to $119. The change goes into effect for new and current subscribers today, but existing customers will receive notification roughly one month before the new price hits their bill.

The streaming service, which also raised its subscription price in August last year, is home to popular titles such as Ted Lasso, Severance, Widow’s Bay and Dark Matter.

If you have the Apple One Individual plan, the new rate is $22 a month, up from $20. This plan bundles access to Apple TV, iCloud Plus, Apple Music and Apple Arcade. For now, pricing for the Family and Premier tiers remains the same.

It’s not the only streamer to hike prices, as Netflix, Spotify, Peacock, Prime Video and others have also implemented price jumps in 2026. This announcement comes ahead of Apple’s big iPhone event on Sept. 9, when it’s rumored to launch a foldable phone among its new lineup.

Kourtnee Jackson

Senior Editor

Kourtnee covers streaming services and entertainment. She previously worked as an entertainment reporter at Endgame 360, where she wrote about film, television, music, celebrities and streaming platforms.

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OS PLATFORMS

GRUB’s up for furry new update

It looks like the Racoon has bedded in and settled down, as Canonical releases the first point release of this year’s Ubuntu LTS version, offering an upgrade to users on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat).

Ubuntu 26.04.1 is the first point release of April’s long-term support version, which will be supported until 2031. Assuming that it follows the pattern of previous Ubuntu LTS releases, 26.04.1 will be followed by four further point releases – usually, the final release comes a little while after the following LTS release. That means Ubuntu 26.04.5 should arrive some time after Ubuntu 28.04 – meaning in or around September 2028.

It’s accompanied by most of the remixes releasing matching point releases: Kubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu Studio, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, and Ubuntu Cinnamon. Notably, two flavors are missing from this list. There are 10 official flavors but only eight point releases lists.

There was no official 26.04 release of Ubuntu MATE. Maintainer Martin Wimpress has stepped down – he has a new project called Nøughty Linux he’s working on instead. There’s not much to see on the website yet, but if you’re curious, his talk at the 2025 Ubuntu Summit will give you a taste.

Ubuntu Unity isn’t in that list, either. That remix missed the 25.10 release cycle because lead developer Rudra Saraswat – whom we first talked to in 2022, when he was 12 – is at university. The good news is that some developers did step up to help and there is an Ubuntu Unity 26.04 release. It replaces a bunch of subcomponents of the previous version, though, and that means it’s officially not an LTS release. Ubuntu Unity users should be aiming for the 26.10 release instead.

This first point release has a few consequences we can expect.

One is that for LTS users, it’s upgrade time, if you are planning on trying to stay current. Canonical does not start offering new version upgrades to LTS users until the first point release. Now that Raring-point-one is here, people running Ubuntu 24.04 “Noble Numbat” will start to see offers to upgrade to the new version.

This applies to those running their Ubuntu servers as pets, rather than herding them like cattle. One of the things that really crumples the cardigans of hardcore Debianisti is that Canonical inserts messages into the output of the apt command. So the upgrade offers won’t be limited to graphical desktop users.

Another consequence, albeit less concerned with any of the official flavors, is that System 76’s Pop!_OS 26.04 is expected soon. The company said on LinkedIn that they were aiming for an end-June release date. That didn’t happen.

The team is certainly hard at work. Its in-house COSMIC desktop hit version 1.0 in December last year, and earlier this week, it released COSMIC version 1.7.0. That means that the next Pop!_OS will now use Ubuntu 26.04.1.

The Reg FOSS desk is becoming quite fond of COSMIC and Pop!_OS, after a fairly shaky start. It feels quite a bit faster than Ubuntu itself, and on our newer testbed laptop – a 2018 Dell XPS13 – it’s not only very fast to start, but its ability to change the screen DPI on the fly is very handy. On older kit, it can make effective use of NVIDIA GPUs that the official binary driver can no longer use on modern kernels, although we have seen it freeze up quite a few times on those 10-15 year old machines. 

COSMIC is new and it’s developing faster than any other desktop in the Linux world. The team has ambitious plans for “Epoch 2” and beyond. At the rate they’re moving, perhaps Pop!_OS 26.04 will come with COSMIC 2. ®

You might have to pay a bit more to catch the end of the latest Ted Lasso season.

• Grand Theft Auto 6 can take up to 80 hours to beat
• Rob Nelson, the head of development, says it took him 80 hours, including the main story and some “optional goals with narrative ramifications,” to complete the game
• This makes GTA 6 Rockstar’s longest game yet

I hope Grand Theft Auto 6 fans have booked enough time off work, because the game will take up to 80 hours to beat, and that’s just the main story.

In a new interview with The New York Times, Rob Nelson, the head of development and co-studio head at Rockstar North, revealed that his playthrough took 80 hours to finish, including the main story and some “optional goals with narrative ramifications.”

A hot potato: X says that it has just identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts created by Chinese operators. What’s getting a lot of attention is that 200 of these accounts were apparently dedicated to posting anti-AI data center content designed to influence public perception. The country has tried this before with little success – most people already hate the facilities, anyway.

X’s Global Government Affairs writes that the 200 accounts were posting “in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy.”

The posts contained “claims” that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid. Other posts featured AI-generated cartoons that depicted data-center operators enriching themselves at the public’s expense.

– Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) August 28, 2026

At least two of the example images appeared in a similar OpenAI report from June. It claimed that China-based ChatGPT users asked the chatbot for ways to influence Americans’ opinions of data centers in the US. The resulting posts also claimed that AI data center buildouts for AI were increasing electricity prices for average families.

When discussing rising electricity prices, the OpenAI report said the accounts “claimed” this was the case. But it really is happening, as noted by Bloomberg, which found that prices have risen by up to 267% in areas near data centers.

Goldman Sachs came to a similar conclusion. It wrote that electricity prices have already increased by 6.9% year-over-year as of February 2026, and they’ll continue to increase as more AI data centers are built.

X didn’t say what the remaining 198,800 accounts were posting. OpenAI’s June report said the other main content criticized US tariffs and technology policies, so one could assume the same thing was happening here.

The pushback against data centers in the US has been growing in both size and intensity. It’s led to claims that the opposition hurts the economy and national security. Fox News compared it to protesting against tank and plane factories during World War II. Even President Donald Trump said those opposing the construction of new data centers are “making a mistake.”

Ultimately, it feels like China is wasting its time trying to convince people of something they already believe. The facilities consume enormous amounts of electricity and can strain power grids that were never designed for such concentrated demand. One planned Michigan campus is expected to draw 1.4 gigawatts – roughly the output of a nuclear power plant – while residents have also raised concerns about traffic and the loss of agricultural land.

Water use is another major concern. Virginia data centers consumed at least 1.85 billion gallons in 2023, up from 1.13 billion gallons in 2019. In Georgia, one development used 29 million gallons of water before receiving a bill while nearby residents complained about low water pressure.

The expansion can also bring constant noise and more pollution, especially as operators turn to diesel generators and gas turbines when the grid cannot keep up. China may be exploiting the controversy, but it certainly didn’t invent it.

Flash memory is fast, compact and everywhere, but its biggest drawbacks have never completely disappeared.

Why flash memory became so popular

monte_a/Shutterstock

The greatest drawback is that flash wears out

Screenshot by Husain Parvez (Samsung)

What could replace flash memory?

Alberto Garcia Guillen/Shutterstock

Henry van Dyck of Veritasium wanted a number, not a slogan. Classroom posters and superhero movies have spent years saying silk spider webbing beats steel. In a video he co-wrote and co-hosted with Derek Muller, he took that claim into Professor Todd Blackledge’s spider lab at the University of Akron and put live threads on a tensile tester, without harming the animals that made them.

Garden variety dragline silk, the cable a spider uses to keep from falling, and the framework of a web are all very impressive. When you put a 600 megapascal number on a rope, you get a sense of how strong it actually is. A silk thread with a cross section the size of a little finger can support around 60,000 newtons, which is comparable to the weight of an adult African elephant. Van Dyck was able to replicate that in the lab, but emphasized that this was simply an average occurrence.

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Darwin’s bark spiders in the wild, deep in Madagascar, weave some magnificent webs across rivers up to 25 meters wide to snare unsuspecting insects flying over the water. Their dragline silk has been measured at an incredible 1,600 megapascals, more than twice the strength of the average Akron sample, making it the toughest biological fiber we’ve ever measured, even beating out the strongest experimental ultra-high-strength steels that come in at around 3,000 megapascals, but as soon as two wires of equal thickness are matched, those steels break, whereas the spider’s silk holds up just fine.

The density of the materials tells a quite different story, as steel is around six times heavier than silk for the same volume. When the weights of two materials with the same mass and length are compared, the cross section of silk rope is six times bigger than that of steel. Six times the area, at nearly a third of the breaking tension, explains why silk can bear approximately twice the force before collapsing. Engineers refer to this as specific strength, and ordinary spider silk is already competing with fancy steel on this front.

Toughness is a whole other thing, and silk wins hands down. The area under a stress-strain curve indicates a fiber’s toughness, or how much energy it can withstand before breaking. Kevlar is reasonably effective at stopping bullets, with a maximum energy density of around 50 megajoules per cubic meter. The experimental ultra-high-strength steel weighs in at 170. Van Dyck’s garden silk measured around 205 megajoules, whereas Darwin’s bark spider silk measured up to 520 megajoules, which is roughly ten times more than Kevlar and three times more than experimental steel. Which is fantastic since silk is all about stretching. Kevlar, on the other hand, is stiff like a board. A stiff fiber will rise up the graph quickly and break early, whereas a flexible fiber will simply continue to take the strain as it lengthens, which is where all the extra energy comes from.

Spiders produce this extraordinarily strong fiber from a liquid protein sludge held in silk glands. As the liquid flows out of the spinnerets, long molecules known as spidroins begin to fold themselves into hard crystalline patches for strength and looser, flexible regions for… well, give. There are no explosives or high-pressure mills, only room temperature, a bug diet, and a healthy dose of natural chemistry. Each visible strand actually a bundle of even smaller strands, literally nanostrands, running in parallel, which is why a thread thinner than a hair may still function as a cable.

Farming animals to make spider silk isn’t a feasible solution. Spiders cannot simply be cultivated like cattle. They require plenty of space, and if kept in a tight environment, they will eat each other. Each spider produces only a few hundred feet of useful thread. Those high-end showpieces, such as 18th-century stockings or the iconic cape constructed from a million spiders in Madagascar, were always one-of-a-kind and never mass-produced. Pure natural silk costs millions of dollars per kilogram.

Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, on the other hand, decided to eliminate the spiders entirely in favor of genetically engineering silkworms to generate spider silk. They take silkworms, a super common moth that humans have farmed for thousands of years, and just add a tiny portion of spider DNA to the mix. Van Dyck spent the day at their lab, watching transgenic cocoons come off the line. Last year, they produced almost half a ton of hybrid silk. The good news is that mechanical testing have showed it performs at roughly 60% the level of real spider silk, which is excellent enough to pique the interest of those who manufacture super-tough ballistic panels and medical mesh.

Then Van Dyck decided to pull off a publicity stunt of sorts. He took a bundle of synthetic silk, including ten threads all lined up, to the local climbing gym and requested Muller to try it. He asked Muller to hang from it and swing for a moment. The line held up nicely, although the skin was damaged. The fiber is so thin that the contact patch on a hand becomes a cutting edge. Muller’s palm paid for the demonstration. In materials language, the silk was no longer the weak link, the person holding it was.
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