Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service has played a pivotal role in supporting Ukraine’s successful resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion for years. But with Starlink having become increasingly unreliable due to Musk’s political inclinations and the latest surprise disruptions to service in Ukraine, the Ukrainians and Europe as a whole are now facing urgent questions about how to move forward without it.

As the world’s largest communications satellite network, Starlink can typically support high-speed Internet and data streams for any user or vehicle equipped with a relatively compact Starlink terminal. This has enabled Ukraine to maintain vital communications for both civilian purposes and military operations—and has also expanded the Ukrainian military’s capability to remotely control or provide guidance to drones used in both air defense against Russian attacks and for striking back at Russian targets.

“Starlink currently offers some of the best satellite coverage available, with virtually no competitors when you consider the combination of cost, availability, and ease of use,” according to the head of hardware R&D at the Ukrainian defense company BlueBird Tech, who provided comments to Ars anonymously for security reasons. “In practical terms, the main limitation is the need to position the antenna so it can receive signals from the satellites.”

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Peacock’s series, Crystal Lake, doesn’t feel like a Friday the 13th movie when you first press play, even though it’s set up to be a prequel to the original film. (This review includes spoilers of the original Friday the 13th movie but avoids major Crystal Lake spoilers.)

Instead, Crystal Lake strives to build a drama that’s half homage, half uncharted territory while giving a long-awaited backstory to Pamela Voorhees. The original villain in the first film, Pam Voorhees, shocked audiences in 1980 by popping up out of nowhere in the midst of a brutal camp counselor killing spree, then confronting the final girl with a Norman Bates-like delivery of the movie’s chilling tagline, “Kill her, mommy,” using the voice of her drowned son Jason.

Although the hockey-masked killer, Jason Voorhees, became the horror icon at the center of the franchise, his mom, Pam, continued to fascinate fans who knew very little about her. Beheaded in the first film after just 13 minutes onscreen, her spirit would occasionally appear in later films, but the original actor, Betsy Palmer, who portrayed Pam refused to return, largely because the character has no depth.

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Welcome to Edition 9.16 of the Rocket Report! Lots of SpaceX-related news this week including a couple of Thursday shockers. In one story, the company told the US Space Force thanks, but no thanks after being offered three military launch contracts. Then, on the civil space side of things, SpaceX’s Starship may required up to 22 refuelings to support a lunar landing, a NASA safety panel said.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Miura 5 getting closer to launch. PLD Space says its Miura 5 rocket, due to undertake its inaugural launch next year, is nearing final integration, Aviation Week reports. The rocket is one of three Miura 5s the company has already manufactured, with the other two designed to qualify key system elements, CEO Raúl Torres said in an October 19 program update. PLD Space now targets a first flight of the small-lift vehicle before mid-2027.

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A security researcher has demonstrated a software-only partial jailbreak of the Switch 2, gaining “userland” access that he says “lets us run homebrew, reverse engineer and mod Switch 2 games, back up save files off the Switch, and access most of the Switch 2’s peripherals through MMIO.”

The hack relies on the original Switch version of SmileBasic 4, the latest in a long-running series of programming environments and interpreters that run on Nintendo hardware. The so-called “tethered” hack also requires access to a macOS or Linux PC on the same network to run a node.js package that helps enable privileged system access.

Researcher Sammy Hajhamid writes that he used OpenAI’s Codex to poke at SmileBasic’s language interpreter, using a custom harness that could send USB commands to the system and view results via HDMI (as well as power cycling via a Bluetooth light switch flipping device). After “substantial effort for ~2 weeks,” that harness discovered a 32-bit integer overflow that occurs when removing items from an array in SmileBasic. That error gives access to an array pointer, which in turn allows read and write access to portions of system memory.

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Personalized mRNA vaccines against melanoma—the deadliest form of skin cancer—reduced the risk of death or recurrence by 42 percent compared to standard treatment in a late-stage trial, pharmaceutical partners Merck and Moderna announced Thursday.

The results are a significant advance in melanoma treatment; Merck and Moderna are already engaging with regulatory authorities to get the vaccine approved. More broadly, the vaccine’s success bolsters hope that mRNA vaccines and individualized cancer-targeting medicines offer a new paradigm for cancer therapies.

“From the beginning, we believed mRNA technology could make it possible to develop cancer treatments uniquely matched to each patient’s tumor,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement. The trial results “mark a defining moment for that vision and show what’s possible when we rethink how medicines are made.” They also “reinforce our conviction that mRNA has the potential to fundamentally change how we treat cancer,” he said.

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NASA does not have, nor want, nuclear weapons. But when it comes to a particular metric that is part of the Artemis Program to land people on the Moon, NASA guards a particular number like they are trying to prevent outsiders from cracking nuclear codes.

I am speaking of the number of Starship launches required to fuel a Starship-based lunar lander in low-Earth orbit such that it can fly out to the Moon, land there, and return to lunar orbit.

This number has been a moving target over the years. The general response from NASA has typically been, ‘We don’t know for sure, so we’re not going to say.’ In 2023, for example, the then-director of NASA’s Human Landing System, Lisa Watson-Morgan, told Ars, “We have a general idea, but I’m reluctant to say exactly what that is.”

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Comcast reportedly plans significant job cuts in its cable division as the firm continues to lose residential broadband and TV customers. Comcast lost 144,000 residential broadband customers in Q3 2026, up from a 91,000-customer loss in the same quarter a year ago, the company said in its earnings report today.

Comcast historically capitalized on a lack of competition for high-speed wired broadband. But now it faces stronger competition from fixed wireless providers and from fiber providers in parts of its cable territory.

“Fixed wireless remains aggressive and continues to take share, while fiber construction remains elevated, with pockets of irrational pricing and promotional activity,” Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh said today in an earnings call.

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eMudhra, the certificate authority that issued eight intermediate TLS credentials so weak that anyone could mint certificates for any website or mail server—one had a private encryption key of just 4—said it’s getting out of the business.

V. Srinivasan, chairman of India-based eMudhra Limited, cited increasing costs and complexities of compliance requirements—paired with the business generating just 1 percent of its revenue. He also said that the emergence of organizations providing TLS certificates free of charge further reduced returns on investment when compared to other products and services the company offers.

Don’t let the door hit you on the butt

“However, the level of social media amplification around this incident has brought scrutiny that is out of proportion to SSL/TLS’s place in our business,” the company continued in a Thursday post. “In view of this, after detailed deliberations our board has concluded that withdrawing from global SSL/TLS is the right decision for eMudhra and its shareholders.”

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Those mourning yesterday’s shuttering of highly praised and influential developer BioWare also had to deal with the cancellation of the next Mass Effect game, which was first teased back in 2020. Today, we got our best look at what that game could have been with a short, leaked trailer for Mass Effect: Universe.

In the roughly two-minute montage—which describes itself as “in-engine footage from our small team” that “uses our pre-production assets”—an ex-military officer wearing an N7 trenchcoat (similar to the one seen in that 2020 teaser) encounters an Asari at a bar. He talks of his frustration with military life—”by the time you put out one fire, another had already started”—before discussing his new line of work “stopping [the fires] before they start” and “making the choices no one else is willing to make. Going where others are afraid to go.”

Mass Effect: Universe Trailer
by
u/Random_Hyabusa_Ninja in
masseffect

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A 25-year-old German experimental photographer has won the 2026 Nikon Small World photomicrography competition with a striking image of droplets of ink being deposited on paper by an inkjet printer. Ole Bielfeldt beat out 1,802 other entries hailing from 69 different countries.

Bielfeldt became interested in photomicrography during the COVID-19 lockdown after discovering an old microscope in his parents’ attic. He figured out how to build an adaptor out of a tube and some wood to connect the microscope to his father’s camera and taught himself the art through trial and error, building custom tools as needed. He documents how he captures transformative images of everyday objects with behind-the-scenes videos posted to macrofying, his photography and videography brand.

It was Bielfeldt’s curiosity about the inner workings of inkjet printers that inspired his winning entry, but capturing the action of ink drops being deposited on paper was a challenge, given that the process happens so quickly. The droplets, for instance, moved faster than the camera’s shutter speed. Bielfeldt’s solution was to deconstruct the printer so that the paper moved under a stationary (rather than moving) printhead, and then take the image in a dark room, using a flash to serve as the shutter, thereby freezing the ink drops mid-air. There was no need for pricey equipment. Bielfeldt does not use AI in his images, preferring to rely on traditional techniques.

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