Long thought to be completely disordered, space ice appears to have some crystallized regions, new research suggests.

NSO Group, compañía israelita conocida por el software espía Pegasus, deberá pagar más de 167 millones de dólares en daños punitivos a Meta por una campaña de piratería informática y difusión de malware contra usuarios de WhatsApp. Así lo ha estimad

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 87, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy It’s Officially Too Hot Now Week, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about Sabrina Carpenter and Khaby Lame and intimacy coordinators, finally making a dent in Barbarians at the Gate, watching all the Ben Schwartz and Friends I can find on YouTube, planning my days with the new Finalist beta, recklessly installing all the Apple developer betas after WWDC, thoroughly enjoying Dakota Johnson’s current press tour, and trying to clear all my inboxes before I go on parental leave. It’s… going.I also have for you a much-awaited new browser, a surprise update to a great photo editor, a neat trailer for a meh-looking movie, a classic Steve Jobs speech, and much more. Slightly shorter issue this week, sorry; there’s just a lot going on, but I didn’t want to leave y’all hanging entirely. Oh, and: we’ll be off next week, for Juneteenth, vacation, and general summer chaos reasons. We’ll be back in full force after that, though! Let’s get into it.(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What do you want to know more about? What awesome tricks do you know that everyone else should? What app should everyone be using? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)The DropDia. I know there are a lot of Arc fans here in the Installerverse, and I know you, like me, will have a lot of feelings about the company’s new and extremely AI-focused browser. Personally, I don’t see leaving Arc anytime soon, but there are some really fascinating ideas (and nice design touches) in Dia already. Snapseed 3.0. I completely forgot Snapseed even existed, and now here’s a really nice update with a bunch of new editing tools and a nice new redesign! As straightforward photo editors go, this is one of the better ones. The new version is only on iOS right now, but I assume it’s heading to Android shortly.“I Tried To Make Something In America.” I was first turned onto the story of the Smarter Scrubber by a great Search Engine episode, and this is a great companion to the story about what it really takes to bring manufacturing back to the US. And why it’s hard to justify.. That link, and the trailer, will only do anything for you if you have a newer iPhone. But even if you don’t care about the movie, the trailer — which actually buzzes in sync with the car’s rumbles and revs — is just really, really cool. Android 16. You can’t get the cool, colorful new look just yet or the desktop mode I am extremely excited about — there’s a lot of good stuff in Android 16 but most of it is coming later. Still, Live Updates look good, and there’s some helpful accessibility stuff, as well.The Infinite Machine Olto. I am such a sucker for any kind of futuristic-looking electric scooter, and this one really hits the sweet spot. Part moped, part e-bike, all Blade Runner vibes. If it wasn’t $3,500, then I would’ve probably ordered one already.The Fujifilm X-E5. I kept wondering why Fujifilm didn’t just make, like, a hundred different great-looking cameras at every imaginable price because everyone wants a camera this cool. Well, here we are! It’s a spin on the X100VI but with interchangeable lenses and a few power-user features. All my photographer friends are going to want this.Call Her Alex. I confess I’m no Call Her Daddy diehard, but I found this two-part doc on Alex Cooper really interesting. Cooper’s story is all about understanding people, the internet, and what it means to feel connected now. It’s all very low-stakes and somehow also existential? It’s only two parts, you should watch it.“Steve Jobs - 2005 Stanford Commencement Address.” For the 20th anniversary of Jobs’ famous (and genuinely fabulous) speech, the Steve Jobs Archive put together a big package of stories, notes, and other materials around the speech. Plus, a newly high-def version of the video. This one’s always worth the 15 minutes.Dune: Awakening. Dune has ascended to the rare territory of “I will check out anything from this franchise, ever, no questions asked.” This game is big on open-world survival and ornithopters, too, so it’s even more my kind of thing. And it’s apparently punishingly difficult in spots.CrowdsourcedHere’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.“I had tried the paper planner in the leather Paper Republic journal but since have moved onto the Remarkable Paper Pro color e-ink device which takes everything you like about paper but makes it editable and color coded. Combine this with a Remarkable planner in PDF format off of Etsy and you are golden.” — Jason“I started reading a manga series from content creator Cory Kenshin called Monsters We Make. So far, I love it. Already preordered Vol. 2.” — Rob“I recently went down the third party controller rabbit hole after my trusty adapted Xbox One controller finally kicked the bucket, and I wanted something I could use across my PC, phone, handheld, Switch, etc. I’ve been playing with the GameSir Cyclone 2 for a few weeks, and it feels really deluxe. The thumbsticks are impossibly smooth and accurate thanks to its TMR joysticks. The face buttons took a second for my brain to adjust to; the short travel distance initially registered as mushy, but once I stopped trying to pound the buttons like I was at the arcade, I found the subtle mechanical click super satisfying.” — Sam“The Apple TV Plus miniseries Long Way Home. It’s Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s fourth Long Way series. This time they are touring some European countries on vintage bikes that they fixed, and it’s such a light-hearted show from two really down to earth humans. Connecting with other people in different cultures and seeing their journey is such a treat!” — Esmael“Podcast recommendation: Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by Christianity Today. A deep dive into the Satanic Panic of the 80’s and 90’s.” — Drew“Splatoon 3 (the free Switch 2 update) and the new How to Train Your Dragon.” — Aaron“I can’t put Mario Kart World down. When I get tired of the intense Knockout Tour mode I go to Free Roam and try to knock out P-Switch challenges, some of which are really tough! I’m obsessed.” — Dave“Fable, a cool app for finding books with virtual book clubs. It’s the closest to a more cozy online bookstore with more honest reviews. I just wish you could click on the author’s name to see their other books.” — Astrid“This is the Summer Games Fest week (formerly E3, RIP) and there are a TON of game demos to try out on Steam. One that has caught my attention / play time the most is Wildgate. It’s a team based spaceship shooter where ship crews battle and try to escape with a powerful artifact.” — Sean“Battlefront 2 is back for some reason. Still looks great.” — IanSigning offI have long been fascinated by weather forecasting. I recommend Andrew Blum’s book, The Weather Machine, to people all the time, as a way to understand both how we learned to predict the weather and why it’s a literally culture-changing thing to be able to do so. And if you want to make yourself so, so angry, there’s a whole chunk of Michael Lewis’s book, The Fifth Risk, about how a bunch of companies managed to basically privatize forecasts… based on government data. The weather is a huge business, an extremely powerful political force, and even more important to our way of life than we realize. And we’re really good at predicting the weather!I’ve also been hearing for years that weather forecasting is a perfect use for AI. It’s all about vast quantities of historical data, tiny fluctuations in readings, and finding patterns that often don’t want to be found. So, of course, as soon as I read my colleague Justine Calma’s story about a new Google project called Weather Lab, I spent the next hour poking through the data to see how well DeepMind managed to predict and track recent storms. It’s deeply wonky stuff, but it’s cool to see Big Tech trying to figure out Mother Nature — and almost getting it right. Almost.See you next week!See More:

There has been a new update to the ongoing Stratasys v. Bambu Lab patent infringement lawsuit.  Both parties have agreed to consolidate the lead and member cases (2:24-CV-00644-JRG and 2:24-CV-00645-JRG) into a single case under Case No. 2:25-cv-00465-JRG.  Industrial 3D printing OEM Stratasys filed the request late last month. According to an official court document, Shenzhen-based Bambu Lab did not oppose the motion. Stratasys argued that this non-opposition amounted to the defendants waiving their right to challenge the request under U.S. patent law 35 U.S.C. § 299(a). On June 2, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, ordered Bambu Lab to confirm in writing whether it agreed to the proposed case consolidation. The court took this step out of an “abundance of caution” to ensure both parties consented to the procedure before moving forward. Bambu Lab submitted its response on June 12, agreeing to the consolidation. The company, along with co-defendants Shenzhen Tuozhu Technology Co., Ltd., Shanghai Lunkuo Technology Co., Ltd., and Tuozhu Technology Limited, waived its rights under 35 U.S.C. § 299(a). The court will now decide whether to merge the cases. This followed U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap’s decision last month to deny Bambu Lab’s motion to dismiss the lawsuits.  The Chinese desktop 3D printer manufacturer filed the motion in February 2025, arguing the cases were invalid because its US-based subsidiary, Bambu Lab USA, was not named in the original litigation. However, it agreed that the lawsuit could continue in the Austin division of the Western District of Texas, where a parallel case was filed last year.  Judge Gilstrap denied the motion, ruling that the cases properly target the named defendants. He concluded that Bambu Lab USA isn’t essential to the dispute, and that any misnaming should be addressed in summary judgment, not dismissal.        A Stratasys Fortus 450mc (left) and a Bambu Lab X1C (right). Image by 3D Printing industry. Another twist in the Stratasys v. Bambu Lab lawsuit  Stratasys filed the two lawsuits against Bambu Lab in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, in August 2024. The company claims that Bambu Lab’s X1C, X1E, P1S, P1P, A1, and A1 mini 3D printers violate ten of its patents. These patents cover common 3D printing features, including purge towers, heated build plates, tool head force detection, and networking capabilities. Stratasys has requested a jury trial. It is seeking a ruling that Bambu Lab infringed its patents, along with financial damages and an injunction to stop Bambu from selling the allegedly infringing 3D printers. Last October, Stratasys dropped charges against two of the originally named defendants in the dispute. Court documents showed that Beijing Tiertime Technology Co., Ltd. and Beijing Yinhua Laser Rapid Prototyping and Mould Technology Co., Ltd were removed. Both defendants represent the company Tiertime, China’s first 3D printer manufacturer. The District Court accepted the dismissal, with all claims dropped without prejudice. It’s unclear why Stratasys named Beijing-based Tiertime as a defendant in the first place, given the lack of an obvious connection to Bambu Lab.  Tiertime and Stratasys have a history of legal disputes over patent issues. In 2013, Stratasys sued Afinia, Tiertime’s U.S. distributor and partner, for patent infringement. Afinia responded by suing uCRobotics, the Chinese distributor of MakerBot 3D printers, also alleging patent violations. Stratasys acquired MakerBot in June 2013. The company later merged with Ultimaker in 2022. In February 2025, Bambu Lab filed a motion to dismiss the original lawsuits. The company argued that Stratasys’ claims, focused on the sale, importation, and distribution of 3D printers in the United States, do not apply to the Shenzhen-based parent company. Bambu Lab contended that the allegations concern its American subsidiary, Bambu Lab USA, which was not named in the complaint filed in the Eastern District of Texas. Bambu Lab filed a motion to dismiss, claiming the case is invalid under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 19. It argued that any party considered a “primary participant” in the allegations must be included as a defendant.    The court denied the motion on May 29, 2025. In the ruling, Judge Gilstrap explained that Stratasys’ allegations focus on the actions of the named defendants, not Bambu Lab USA. As a result, the official court document called Bambu Lab’s argument “unavailing.” Additionally, the Judge stated that, since Bambu Lab USA and Bambu Lab are both owned by Shenzhen Tuozhu, “the interest of these two entities align,” meaning the original cases are valid.   In the official court document, Judge Gilstrap emphasized that Stratasys can win or lose the lawsuits based solely on the actions of the current defendants, regardless of Bambu Lab USA’s involvement. He added that any potential risk to Bambu Lab USA’s business is too vague or hypothetical to justify making it a required party. Finally, the court noted that even if Stratasys named the wrong defendant, this does not justify dismissal under Rule 12(b)(7). Instead, the judge stated it would be more appropriate for the defendants to raise that argument in a motion for summary judgment. The Bambu Lab X1C 3D printer. Image via Bambu Lab. 3D printing patent battles  The 3D printing industry has seen its fair share of patent infringement disputes over recent months. In May 2025, 3D printer hotend developer Slice Engineering reached an agreement with Creality over a patent non-infringement lawsuit.  The Chinese 3D printer OEM filed the lawsuit in July 2024 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, Gainesville Division. The company claimed that Slice Engineering had falsely accused it of infringing two hotend patents, U.S. Patent Nos. 10,875,244 and 11,660,810. These cover mechanical and thermal features of Slice’s Mosquito 3D printer hotend. Creality requested a jury trial and sought a ruling confirming it had not infringed either patent. Court documents show that Slice Engineering filed a countersuit in December 2024. The Gainesville-based company maintained that Creaility “has infringed and continues to infringe” on both patents. In the filing, the company also denied allegations that it had harassed Creality’s partners, distributors, and customers, and claimed that Creality had refused to negotiate a resolution.   The Creality v. Slice Engineering lawsuit has since been dropped following a mutual resolution. Court documents show that both parties have permanently dismissed all claims and counterclaims, agreeing to cover their own legal fees and costs.  In other news, large-format resin 3D printer manufacturer Intrepid Automation sued 3D Systems over alleged patent infringement. The lawsuit, filed in February 2025, accused 3D Systems of using patented technology in its PSLA 270 industrial resin 3D printer. The filing called the PSLA 270 a “blatant knock off” of Intrepid’s DLP multi-projection “Range” 3D printer.   San Diego-based Intrepid Automation called this alleged infringement the “latest chapter of 3DS’s brazen, anticompetitive scheme to drive a smaller competitor with more advanced technology out of the marketplace.” The lawsuit also accused 3D Systems of corporate espionage, claiming one of its employees stole confidential trade secrets that were later used to develop the PSLA 270 printer. 3D Systems denied the allegations and filed a motion to dismiss the case. The company called the lawsuit “a desperate attempt” by Intrepid to distract from its own alleged theft of 3D Systems’ trade secrets. Who won the 2024 3D Printing Industry Awards? Subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry newsletter to keep up with the latest 3D printing news.You can also follow us on LinkedIn, and subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry Youtube channel to access more exclusive content.Featured image shows a Stratasys Fortus 450mc (left) and a Bambu Lab X1C (right). Image by 3D Printing industry.

This month, join forces to tackle the paranormal crises of a mysterious federal agency under siege in the cooperative first-person shooter FBC: Firebreak, lead your team to victory in the iconic all-out warfare of Battlefield 2042, test your skills as a new Fazbear employee managing and maintaining the eerie pizzeria of Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted 2 or live for the thrill of the hunt in the realistic hunting open world theHunter: Call of the Wild. All of these titles and more are available in June’s PlayStation Plus Game Catalog lineup*.    Meanwhile, PS2’s Deus Ex: The Conspiracy merges action-RPG, stealth and FPS gameplay in PlayStation Plus Premium.    All titles will be available to play on June 17.   PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium | Game Catalog  View and download image Download the image close Close Download this image FBC: Firebreak | PS5 Launching on the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog this month is FBC: Firebreak, a cooperative first-person shooter set within a mysterious federal agency under assault by otherworldly forces. Return to the strange and unexpected world of Control or venture in for the first time in this standalone, multiplayer experience. As a years-long siege on the agency’s headquarters reaches its boiling point, only Firebreak—the Bureau’s most versatile unit—has the gear and the guts to plunge into the building’s strangest crises, restore order, contain the chaos, and fight to reclaim control. Join forces with friends or strangers to tackle each job as a well-oiled crew. Survival in this three-player cooperative FPS hinges on quick thinking and seamless teamwork as you scramble to tame raging paranatural crises across a variety of unexpected locations.    View and download image Download the image close Close Download this image Battlefield 2042 | PS4, PS5 Battlefield 2042 is a first-person shooter that marks the return to the iconic all-out warfare of the franchise. With the help of a cutting-edge arsenal, engage in intense, immersive multiplayer battles. Lead your team to victory in both large all-out warfare and close quarters combat on maps from the world of 2042 and classic Battlefield titles. Find your playstyle in class-based gameplay and take on several experiences comprising elevated versions of Conquest and Breakthrough. Explore Battlefield Portal, a platform where players can discover, create, and share unexpected battles from Battlefield’s past and present. View and download image Download the image close Close Download this image Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted 2 | PS5 Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted 2 is the sequel to the terrifying VR experience that brought new life to the iconic horror franchise. As a brand new Fazbear employee you’ll have to prove you have what it takes to excel in all aspects of Pizzeria management and maintenance. Find out if you have what it takes to be a Fazbear Entertainment Superstar! View and download image Download the image close Close Download this image theHunter: Call of the Wild | PS4 Discover an atmospheric hunting game like no other in this realistic, stunning open world – regularly updated in collaboration with its community. Immerse yourself in the single player campaign, or share the ultimate hunting experience with friends. Roam freely across meticulously crafted environments and explore a diverse range of regions and biomes, each with its own unique flora and fauna. Experience the intricacies of complex animal behavior, dynamic weather events, full day and night cycles, simulated ballistics, highly realistic acoustics, and scents carried by the wind. Select from a variety of weapons, ammunition, and equipment to create the ultimate hunting experience. With a diverse range of wildlife, including Jackrabbits, Mallard Ducks, Black Bears, Elk, and Moose, you will need to strategically match prey to weaponry to successfully track, lure, and ambush animals based on their unique behavior and environment. View and download image Download the image close Close Download this image We Love Katamari Reroll + Royal Reverie | PS4, PS5 We Love Katamari Damacy, the second title in the Katamari series released in 2005, has been remastered with redesigned graphics and a revamped in-game UI. The King of the Cosmos accidentally destroyed all the stars in the universe. He sent his son, the Prince, to Earth and ordered him to create a large katamari. Roll the katamari to make it bigger and bigger, rolling up all the things on the earth. You can roll up anything from paper clips and snacks in the house, to telephone poles and buildings in the town, to even living creatures such as people and animals. Once the katamari is complete, it will turn into a star that colors the night sky. You cannot roll up anything larger than the current size of your katamari, so the key is to think in advance about the order in which you roll things up around the stage. In Royal Reverie, roll up katamari as the King of All Cosmos in his boyhood! View and download image Download the image close Close Download this image Eiyuden Chronicles: Hundred Heroes | PS4, PS5 Directed and produced by the creator of treasured JRPG series Suikoden, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes provides a contemporary take on the classic JRPG experience. In the land of Allraan, two friends from different backgrounds are united by a war waged by the power-hungry Galdean Empire. Explore a diverse, magical world populated by humans, beastmen, elves and desert people. Meet and recruit over 100 unique characters, each with their own vivid voice acting and intricate backstories. Over four years in the making, and funded by the most successful Kickstarter videogame campaign of 2020, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes features turn-based battles, a staggering selection of heroes and a thrilling story to discover. View and download image Download the image close Close Download this image Train Sim World 5 | PS4, PS5 The rails are yours in Train Sim World 5! Take on new challenges and new roles as you master the tracks and trains of iconic cities across 3 new routes. Immerse yourself in the ultimate rail hobby and embark on your next journey. Be swept off your feet with the commuter mayhem of the West Coast main line with the Northwestern Class 350, the twisting Kinzigtalbahn with the tilting DB BR 411 ICE-T, or the sun-soaked tracks of the San Bernardino line and its Metrolink movements, powered by the MP36 & F125.  View and download image Download the image close Close Download this image Endless Dungeon | PS4, PS5 Endless Dungeon is a unique blend of roguelite, tactical action, and tower defense set in the award-winning Endless Universe. Plunge into an abandoned space station alone or with friends in co-op, recruit a team of shipwrecked heroes, and protect your crystal against never-ending waves of monsters… or die trying, get reloaded, and try again. You’re stranded on an abandoned space station chock-full of monsters and mysteries. To get out you’ll have to reach The Core, but you can’t do that without your crystal bot. That scuttling critter is your key to surviving the procedurally generated rooms of this space ruin. Sadly, it’s also a fragile soul, and every monster in the place wants a piece of it. You’re going to have to think quick, plan well, place your turrets, and then… fireworks! Bugs, bots and blobs will stop at nothing to turn you and that crystal into dust and debris. With a large choice of weapons and turrets, the right gear will be the difference between life and death. PlayStation Plus Premium  View and download image Download the image close Close Download this image Deus Ex: The Conspiracy | PS4, PS5This is an emulation of the classic PS2 title, Deus Ex: The Conspiracy, playable on PS4 and PS5 for the first time. The year is 2052 and the world is a dangerous and chaotic place. Terrorists operate openly – killing thousands; drugs, disease and pollution kill even more. The world’s economies are close to collapse and the gap between the insanely wealthy and the desperately poor grows ever wider. Worst of all, an age- old conspiracy bent on world domination has decided that the time is right to emerge from the shadows and take control.  *PlayStation Plus Game Catalog and PlayStation Plus Premium/Deluxe lineups may differ by region. Please check PlayStation Store on release day. 

Donald Trump’s military parade in Washington this weekend — a show of force in the capital that just happens to take place on the president’s birthday — smacks of authoritarian Dear Leader-style politics (even though Trump actually got the idea after attending the 2017 Bastille Day parade in Paris).Yet as disconcerting as the imagery of tanks rolling down Constitution Avenue will be, it’s not even close to Trump’s most insidious assault on the US military’s historic and democratically essential nonpartisan ethos.In fact, it’s not even the most worrying thing he’s done this week.On Tuesday, the president gave a speech at Fort Bragg, an Army base home to Special Operations Command. While presidential speeches to soldiers are not uncommon — rows of uniformed troops make a great backdrop for a foreign policy speech — they generally avoid overt partisan attacks and campaign-style rhetoric. The soldiers, for their part, are expected to be studiously neutral, laughing at jokes and such, but remaining fully impassive during any policy conversation.That’s not what happened at Fort Bragg. Trump’s speech was a partisan tirade that targeted “radical left” opponents ranging from Joe Biden to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. He celebrated his deployment of Marines to Los Angeles, proposed jailing people for burning the American flag, and called on soldiers to be “aggressive” toward the protesters they encountered.The soldiers, for their part, cheered Trump and booed his enemies — as they were seemingly expected to. Reporters at Military.com, a military news service, uncovered internal communications from 82nd Airborne leadership suggesting that the crowd was screened for their political opinions.“If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don’t want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out,” one note read.To call this unusual is an understatement. I spoke with four different experts on civil-military relations, two of whom teach at the Naval War College, about the speech and its implications. To a person, they said it was a step towards politicizing the military with no real precedent in modern American history.“That is, I think, a really big red flag because it means the military’s professional ethic is breaking down internally,” says Risa Brooks, a professor at Marquette University. “Its capacity to maintain that firewall against civilian politicization may be faltering.”This may sound alarmist — like an overreading of a one-off incident — but it’s part of a bigger pattern. The totality of Trump administration policies, ranging from the parade in Washington to the LA troop deployment to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s firing of high-ranking women and officers of color, suggests a concerted effort to erode the military’s professional ethos and turn it into an institution subservient to the Trump administration’s whims. This is a signal policy aim of would-be dictators, who wish to head off the risk of a coup and ensure the armed forces’ political reliability if they are needed to repress dissent in a crisis.Steve Saideman, a professor at Carleton University, put together a list of eight different signs that a military is being politicized in this fashion. The Trump administration has exhibited six out of the eight.“The biggest theme is that we are seeing a number of checks on the executive fail at the same time — and that’s what’s making individual events seem more alarming than they might otherwise,” says Jessica Blankshain, a professor at the Naval War College (speaking not for the military but in a personal capacity).That Trump is trying to politicize the military does not mean he has succeeded. There are several signs, including Trump’s handpicked chair of the Joint Chiefs repudiating the president’s claims of a migrant invasion during congressional testimony, that the US military is resisting Trump’s politicization.But the events in Fort Bragg and Washington suggest that we are in the midst of a quiet crisis in civil-military relations in the United States — one whose implications for American democracy’s future could well be profound.The Trump crisis in civil-military relations, explainedA military is, by sheer fact of its existence, a threat to any civilian government. If you have an institution that controls the overwhelming bulk of weaponry in a society, it always has the physical capacity to seize control of the government at gunpoint. A key question for any government is how to convince the armed forces that they cannot or should not take power for themselves.Democracies typically do this through a process called “professionalization.” Soldiers are rigorously taught to think of themselves as a class of public servants, people trained to perform a specific job within defined parameters. Their ultimate loyalty is not to their generals or even individual presidents, but rather to the people and the constitutional order.Samuel Huntington, the late Harvard political scientist, is the canonical theorist of a professional military. In his book The Soldier and the State, he described optimal professionalization as a system of “objective control”: one in which the military retains autonomy in how they fight and plan for wars while deferring to politicians on whether and why to fight in the first place. In effect, they stay out of the politicians’ affairs while the politicians stay out of theirs.The idea of such a system is to emphasize to the military that they are professionals: Their responsibility isn’t deciding when to use force, but only to conduct operations as effectively as possible once ordered to engage in them. There is thus a strict firewall between military affairs, on the one hand, and policy-political affairs on the other.Typically, the chief worry is that the military breaches this bargain: that, for example, a general starts speaking out against elected officials’ policies in ways that undermine civilian control. This is not a hypothetical fear in the United States, with the most famous such example being Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s insubordination during the Korean War. Thankfully, not even MacArthur attempted the worst-case version of military overstep — a coup.But in backsliding democracies like the modern United States, where the chief executive is attempting an anti-democratic power grab, the military poses a very different kind of threat to democracy — in fact, something akin to the exact opposite of the typical scenario.In such cases, the issue isn’t the military inserting itself into politics but rather the civilians dragging them into it in ways that upset the democratic political order. The worst-case scenario is that the military acts on presidential directives to use force against domestic dissenters, destroying democracy not by ignoring civilian orders, but by following them.There are two ways to arrive at such a worst-case scenario, both of which are in evidence in the early days of Trump 2.0.First is politicization: an intentional attack on the constraints against partisan activity inside the professional ranks.Many of Pete Hegseth’s major moves as secretary of defense fit this bill, including his decisions to fire nonwhite and female generals seen as politically unreliable and his effort to undermine the independence of the military’s lawyers. The breaches in protocol at Fort Bragg are both consequences and causes of politicization: They could only happen in an environment of loosened constraint, and they might encourage more overt political action if gone unpunished.The second pathway to breakdown is the weaponization of professionalism against itself. Here, Trump exploits the military’s deference to politicians by ordering it to engage in undemocratic (and even questionably legal) activities. In practice, this looks a lot like the LA deployments, and, more specifically, the lack of any visible military pushback. While the military readily agreeing to deployments is normally a good sign — that civilian control is holding — these aren’t normal times. And this isn’t a normal deployment, but rather one that comes uncomfortably close to the military being ordered to assist in repressing overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations against executive abuses of power.“It’s really been pretty uncommon to use the military for law enforcement,” says David Burbach, another Naval War College professor (also speaking personally). “This is really bringing the military into frontline law enforcement when. … these are really not huge disturbances.”This, then, is the crisis: an incremental and slow-rolling effort by the Trump administration to erode the norms and procedures designed to prevent the military from being used as a tool of domestic repression. Is it time to panic?Among the experts I spoke with, there was consensus that the military’s professional and nonpartisan ethos was weakening. This isn’t just because of Trump, but his terms — the first to a degree, and now the second acutely — are major stressors.Yet there was no consensus on just how much military nonpartisanship has eroded — that is, how close we are to a moment when the US military might be willing to follow obviously authoritarian orders.For all its faults, the US military’s professional ethos is a really important part of its identity and self-conception. While few soldiers may actually read Sam Huntington or similar scholars, the general idea that they serve the people and the republic is a bedrock principle among the ranks. There is a reason why the United States has never, in over 250 years of governance, experienced a military coup — or even come particularly close to one.In theory, this ethos should also galvanize resistance to Trump’s efforts at politicization. Soldiers are not unthinking automatons: While they are trained to follow commands, they are explicitly obligated to refuse illegal orders, even coming from the president. The more aggressive Trump’s efforts to use the military as a tool of repression gets, the more likely there is to be resistance.Or, at least theoretically.The truth is that we don’t really know how the US military will respond to a situation like this. Like so many of Trump’s second-term policies, their efforts to bend the military to their will are unprecedented — actions with no real parallel in the modern history of the American military. Experts can only make informed guesses, based on their sense of US military culture as well as comparisons to historical and foreign cases.For this reason, there are probably only two things we can say with confidence.First, what we’ve seen so far is not yet sufficient evidence to declare that the military is in Trump’s thrall. The signs of decay are too limited to ground any conclusions that the longstanding professional norm is entirely gone.“We have seen a few things that are potentially alarming about erosion of the military’s non-partisan norm. But not in a way that’s definitive at this point,” Blankshain says.Second, the stressors on this tradition are going to keep piling on. Trump’s record makes it exceptionally clear that he wants the military to serve him personally — and that he, and Hegseth, will keep working to make it so. This means we really are in the midst of a quiet crisis, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.“The fact that he’s getting the troops to cheer for booing Democratic leaders at a time when there’s actually [a deployment to] a blue city and a blue state…he is ordering the troops to take a side,” Saideman says. “There may not be a coherent plan behind this. But there are a lot of things going on that are all in the same direction.”See More: Politics

1047 Games cofounder Ian Proulx took the stage at Summer Game Fest on Friday to promote his new game Splitgate 2 by calling out the current state of online shooters. Eschewing the marketing speak of most of his peers at the glossy showcase, he said he wants Titanfall 3 to come out and called his new game’s surprise battle royale mode “fucking awesome” while wearing a “Make FPS Great Again” hat. Suggested ReadingThe Week In Games: A Star Wars Classic Returns & More New Releases Share SubtitlesOffEnglishview videoSuggested ReadingThe Week In Games: A Star Wars Classic Returns & More New Releases Share SubtitlesOffEnglishSplitgate 2 is a free-to-play arena-style shooter where players deploy portals to mess with physics and the fabric of reality to outwit their opponents. “I grew up playing Halo and I’m tired of playing the same Call of Duty every year and I wish we could have Titanfall 3,” Proulx said on stage alongside host Geoff Keighley. He added that the new battle roayle mode aims to combine the old-school arena shooter sensibility with a mechanic to portal to other worlds. Out today on console and PC after a beta last month, 1047 revealed that the new mode is going live alongside the rest of the game. The subtext of Proulx’s pitch channeling President Trump’s slogan was clear: while EA cancels games and Activision leans into predictable cash-grabs, the underdog team at 1047 is shaking things up with a game by gamers for gamers. Meanwhile, the riff on “Make America Great Again” took place shortly after a clash between Los Angeles residents and law enforcement over ICE raids in the city’s garment district only blocks from where Keighley’s Summer Game Fest Play Days industry event takes place this weekend. Trump has ordered the immigration agency to arrest a record number of people every day for deportation even as ICE detention centers are criticized for overcrowding and lack of food. The original Splitgate launched in early access in 2019 and spiked in popularity. The party didn’t last, however, and by 2022, the studio abandoned the game to work on a new project. Last year it revealed that new project was actually just Splitgate 2. .

This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. President Donald Trump signed an executive order (EO) Friday that scratched or revised several of his Democratic predecessors’ major cybersecurity initiatives. “Just days before President Trump took office, the Biden Administration attempted to sneak problematic and distracting issues into cybersecurity policy,” the White House said in a fact sheet about Trump’s new directive, referring to projects that Biden launched with his Jan. 15 executive order. Trump’s new EO eliminates those projects, which would have required software vendors to prove their compliance with new federal security standards, prioritized research and testing of artificial intelligence for cyber defense and accelerated the rollout of encryption that withstands the future code-cracking powers of quantum computers. “President Trump has made it clear that this Administration will do what it takes to make America cyber secure,” the White House said in its fact sheet, “including focusing relentlessly on technical and organizational professionalism to improve the security and resilience of the nation’s information systems and networks.” Major cyber regulation shift Trump’s elimination of Biden’s software security requirements for federal contractors represents a significant government reversal on cyber regulation. Following years of major cyberattacks linked to insecure software, the Biden administration sought to use federal procurement power to improve the software industry’s practices. That effort began with Biden’s 2021 cyber order and gained strength in 2024, and then Biden officials tried to add teeth to the initiative before leaving office in January. But as it eliminated that project on Friday, the Trump administration castigated Biden’s efforts as “imposing unproven and burdensome software accounting processes that prioritized compliance checklists over genuine security investments.” Trump’s order eliminates provisions from Biden’s directive that would have required federal contractors to submit “secure software development attestations,” along with technical data to back up those attestations. Also now eradicated are provisions that would have required the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to verify vendors’ attestations, required the Office of the National Cyber Director to publish the results of those reviews and encouraged ONCD to refer companies whose attestations fail a review to the Justice Department “for action as appropriate.” Trump’s order leaves in place a National Institute of Standards and Technology collaboration with industry to update NIST’s Software Software Development Framework, but it eliminates parts of Biden’s order that would have incorporated those SSDF updates into security requirements for federal vendors. In a related move, Trump eliminated provisions of his predecessor’s order that would have required NIST to “issue guidance identifying minimum cybersecurity practices” (based on a review of globally accepted standards) and required federal contractors to follow those practices. AI security cut Trump also took an axe to Biden requirements related to AI and its ability to help repel cyberattacks. He scrapped a Biden initiative to test AI’s power to “enhance cyber defense of critical infrastructure in the energy sector,” as well as one that would have directed federal research programs to prioritize topics like the security of AI-powered coding and “methods for designing secure AI systems.” The EO also killed a provision would have required the Pentagon to “use advanced AI models for cyber defense.” On quantum computing, Trump’s directive significantly pares back Biden’s attempts to accelerate the government’s adoption of post-quantum cryptography. Biden told agencies to start using quantum-resistant encryption “as soon as practicable” and to start requiring vendors to use it when technologically possible. Trump eliminated those requirements, leaving only a Biden requirement that CISA maintain “a list of product categories in which products that support post-quantum cryptography … are widely available.” Trump also eliminated instructions for the departments of State and Commerce to encourage key foreign allies and overseas industries to adopt NIST’s PQC algorithms. The EO dropped many other provisions of Biden’s January directive, including one requiring agencies to start testing phishing-resistant authentication technologies, one requiring NIST to advise other agencies on internet routing security and one requiring agencies to use strong email encryption. Trump also cut language directing the Office of Management and Budget to advise agencies on addressing risks related to IT vendor concentration. In his January order, Biden ordered agencies to explore and encourage the use of digital identity documents to prevent fraud, including in public benefits programs. Trump eliminated those initiatives, calling them “inappropriate.”  Trump also tweaked the language of Obama-era sanctions authorities targeting people involved in cyberattacks on the U.S., specifying that the Treasury Department can only sanction foreigners for these activities. The White House said Trump’s change would prevent the power’s “misuse against domestic political opponents.” Amid the whirlwind of changes, Trump left one major Biden-era cyber program intact: a Federal Communications Commission project, modeled on the Energy Star program, that will apply government seals of approval to technology products that undergo security testing by federally accredited labs. Trump preserved the language in Biden’s order that requires companies selling internet-of-things devices to the federal government to go through the FCC program by January 2027.

Autoregressive image generation has been shaped by advances in sequential modeling, originally seen in natural language processing. This field focuses on generating images one token at a time, similar to how sentences are constructed in language models. The appeal of this approach lies in its ability to maintain structural coherence across the image while allowing for high levels of control during the generation process. As researchers began to apply these techniques to visual data, they found that structured prediction not only preserved spatial integrity but also supported tasks like image manipulation and multimodal translation effectively. Despite these benefits, generating high-resolution images remains computationally expensive and slow. A primary issue is the number of tokens needed to represent complex visuals. Raster-scan methods that flatten 2D images into linear sequences require thousands of tokens for detailed images, resulting in long inference times and high memory consumption. Models like Infinity need over 10,000 tokens for a 1024×1024 image. This becomes unsustainable for real-time applications or when scaling to more extensive datasets. Reducing the token burden while preserving or improving output quality has become a pressing challenge. Efforts to mitigate token inflation have led to innovations like next-scale prediction seen in VAR and FlexVAR. These models create images by predicting progressively finer scales, which imitates the human tendency to sketch rough outlines before adding detail. However, they still rely on hundreds of tokens—680 in the case of VAR and FlexVAR for 256×256 images. Moreover, approaches like TiTok and FlexTok use 1D tokenization to compress spatial redundancy, but they often fail to scale efficiently. For example, FlexTok’s gFID increases from 1.9 at 32 tokens to 2.5 at 256 tokens, highlighting a degradation in output quality as the token count grows. Researchers from ByteDance introduced DetailFlow, a 1D autoregressive image generation framework. This method arranges token sequences from global to fine detail using a process called next-detail prediction. Unlike traditional 2D raster-scan or scale-based techniques, DetailFlow employs a 1D tokenizer trained on progressively degraded images. This design allows the model to prioritize foundational image structures before refining visual details. By mapping tokens directly to resolution levels, DetailFlow significantly reduces token requirements, enabling images to be generated in a semantically ordered, coarse-to-fine manner. The mechanism in DetailFlow centers on a 1D latent space where each token contributes incrementally more detail. Earlier tokens encode global features, while later tokens refine specific visual aspects. To train this, the researchers created a resolution mapping function that links token count to target resolution. During training, the model is exposed to images of varying quality levels and learns to predict progressively higher-resolution outputs as more tokens are introduced. It also implements parallel token prediction by grouping sequences and predicting entire sets at once. Since parallel prediction can introduce sampling errors, a self-correction mechanism was integrated. This system perturbs certain tokens during training and teaches subsequent tokens to compensate, ensuring that final images maintain structural and visual integrity. The results from the experiments on the ImageNet 256×256 benchmark were noteworthy. DetailFlow achieved a gFID score of 2.96 using only 128 tokens, outperforming VAR at 3.3 and FlexVAR at 3.05, both of which used 680 tokens. Even more impressive, DetailFlow-64 reached a gFID of 2.62 using 512 tokens. In terms of speed, it delivered nearly double the inference rate of VAR and FlexVAR. A further ablation study confirmed that the self-correction training and semantic ordering of tokens substantially improved output quality. For example, enabling self-correction dropped the gFID from 4.11 to 3.68 in one setting. These metrics demonstrate both higher quality and faster generation compared to established models. By focusing on semantic structure and reducing redundancy, DetailFlow presents a viable solution to long-standing issues in autoregressive image generation. The method’s coarse-to-fine approach, efficient parallel decoding, and ability to self-correct highlight how architectural innovations can address performance and scalability limitations. Through their structured use of 1D tokens, the researchers from ByteDance have demonstrated a model that maintains high image fidelity while significantly reducing computational load, making it a valuable addition to image synthesis research. Check out the Paper and GitHub Page. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also, feel free to follow us on Twitter and don’t forget to join our 95k+ ML SubReddit and Subscribe to our Newsletter. NikhilNikhil is an intern consultant at Marktechpost. He is pursuing an integrated dual degree in Materials at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Nikhil is an AI/ML enthusiast who is always researching applications in fields like biomaterials and biomedical science. 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