Today’s launch of AST SpaceMobile’s satellite aboard Blue Origin’s reusable rocket was a partial success. The New Glenn first stage booster touched back down on a drone ship without incident, its second launch and landing, and officially giving Jeff Bezos a reusable launch vehicle to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

Unfortunately for Blue Origin and AST SpaceMobile, the overall mission was less successful. The Bluebird 7 cell-tower-in-space was delivered to a lower orbit than expected by the second stage of the launch vehicle, and it will be destroyed. The Orlando Sentinel reports that the FAA announced Sunday night that New Glenn has been grounded, pending an investigation by Blue Origin.

In a statement, AST said:

During the New Glenn 3 mission, BlueBird 7 was placed into a lower than planned orbit by the upper stage of the launch vehicle. While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will de-orbited. The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company’s insurance policy.

BlueBird 7 would have been AST SpaceMobile’s eighth deployed into low Earth orbit and is one of many planned for its space-based cellular broadband network. The company is currently in production through BlueBird 32, with BlueBird 8 to 10 expected to be ready to ship in approximately 30 days.

Blue Origin’s tweet from Sunday morning says:

NG-3 Update: We have confirmed payload separation. AST SpaceMobile has confirmed the satellite has powered on. The payload was placed into an off-nominal orbit. We are currently assessing and will update when we have more detailed information.

Bezos posted a video of the landing on X without comment.

Update, April 20th: Added additional information from the FAA, AST, and Blue Origin.

Vercel, a major development platform that hosts and deploys web apps, was compromised, and the hackers are attempting to sell stolen data. A person claiming to be a member of ShinyHunters, which was behind the recent hack of Rockstar Games, posted some data online, including employee names, email addresses, and activity time stamps. Vercel confirmed in a post on X that a “security incident” had occurred, and that it impacted a “limited subset” of its customers. Vercel said that a compromised third-party AI tool was the avenue for attack, though it did not specify which third party was involved.

Vercel encouraged administrators to review their activity logs for suspicious activity. It also suggested taking steps to “review and rotate environmental variables” as an extra precaution in case API keys, tokens, or other sensitive data were exposed. It ended its security bulletin by saying:

Our investigation has revealed that the incident originated from a third-party AI tool whose Google Workspace OAuth app was the subject of a broader compromise, potentially affecting hundreds of its users across many organizations.

We are publishing the following IOC to support the wider community in the investigation and vetting of potential malicious activity in their environments. We recommend that Google Workspace Administrators and Google Account owners check for usage of this app immediately.

This might feel like a somewhat obvious recommendation to some, but it flew under my radar until now. Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (originally published as Tiger! Tiger! in the UK) is a 1956 sci-fi novel that some have cited as a precursor to cyberpunk. It’s a work I admit I have some conflicted feelings about, but one I think is well worth reading if you consider yourself a fan of sci-fi. It’s also well worth seeking out a physical copy, something I wish I had known before I started reading it in the objectively inferior ebook form that can’t capture the ergodic elements of the climax.

It’s hard to explain the plot of The Stars My Destination. At its core, it’s the story of a man who vows revenge on a spaceship — an inanimate object — after he is left for dead in the wreckage of another ship. But that doesn’t capture any of what the book is actually about. The plot moves so quickly, so much happens in this relatively short 250-page novel, that it’s difficult to keep up. It’s either a riveting breakneck thrill ride or a chaotic jumble of barely coherent events, and I’m still not sure which.

The world laid out in its pages is imaginative, lived in, and shockingly prescient in many ways. The book starts by introducing jaunting, essentially teleportation through sheer force of mind, which has completely disrupted the socioeconomic order. The inner planets are at war with the outer satellites, and the world is largely run by dynastic corporations whose loyalty is only to their bottom line. The wealthy heads of these corporations flaunt their wealth, isolate themselves from the common people, and demonstrate their superiority through the use of obsolete technologies like phones, trains, and horse-drawn carriages. 

The story follows Gully Foyle in his quest for vengeance after a ship called Vorga ignores his pleas for help as he floats helplessly in the wreckage of the Nomad. His journey takes several unpredictable turns as his plans are repeatedly thwarted. When we first meet Foyle, he’s an uneducated man with no ambition, no future, just coasting through life. But over the course of the book, he grows, learns, and transforms from a violent brute operating on pure impulse to a calculating, almost religious figure with cybernetic augmentations.

It all builds to a climax that is a breathtaking depiction of synesthesia. It’s one of the first depictions of the conditions in popular literature, in which a person’s senses become crossed, allowing them to taste sounds or see smells. 

The book has its flaws. Unsurprisingly, being from 1956, the way it handles race and treats women can be problematic. There’s even a sexual assault fairly early in the book that is treated more like an inconvenience or immature mischief, rather than a barbaric crime. And there is a romantic subplot shoehorned into the backend of the book that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

The Stars My Destination is available on most ebook stores, but I highly recommend you go and buy a physical copy at your neighborhood independent bookshop or support your local library.

Jorge L. Alonso, a federal district court judge for the Northern District of Illinois, said that the Trump Administration violated the First Amendment when it pressured Facebook and Apple to remove ICE-tracking groups and apps. Judge Alonso granted the plaintiffs, Kassandra Rosado, who runs the ICE Sightings – Chicagoland Facebook group, and Kreisau Group, the developers of Eyes Up, a preliminary injunction.

Judge Alonso cited a unanimous Supreme Court decision from a 2024 case that pitted the NRA against the former superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services, Maria Vullo. In that case, the court ruled that “[g]overnment officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors,” when Vullo pressured companies to end their business relationships with the NRA. Alonso’s decision continues, saying, “Here, [Pam] Bondi and [Kristi] Noem did exactly that. They reached out to Facebook and Apple and demanded, rather than requested, that Facebook and Apple censor Plaintiff’s speech.”

In the case of the ICE Sightings Facebook group, then Attorney General Pam Bondi bragged on X that an unnamed group “being used to dox and target” ICE agents had been taken down after the DOJ reached out to Meta. Eyes Up, ICEBlock, Red Dot, and other similar apps have been removed from app stores as well, following pressure from the DOJ and public threats of prosecution, including of CNN for simply reporting on the app’s existence.

It’s likely that the government will appeal this decision, and the fight will continue. But the unanimous nature of the precedent set by the Supreme Court in 2024 suggests the Trump administration is facing an uphill battle.

For obvious reasons, I’ve had Moon on the mind all week. So I was trying to figure out what I should recommend this week that would thematically fit. Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks is incredible, and if you haven’t listened to it, go do that now. But it also seemed a bit on the nose. Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool also came to mind. But it also felt a bit obvious. Then I remembered Kate NV’s Room for the Moon, a record I had on repeat in 2020. 

Russian artist Kate Shilonosova chases ideas across 11 tracks inspired by Russian and Japanese pop from the ’70s and ’80s, as well as children’s movies. This obviously leads Room for the Moon to indulge its most whimsical impulses. It’s a fairy tale rendered in snappy Talking Heads-esque bass, proggy synths, and reverbed drum machines.

The opener “Not Not Not” is almost goofy, its chaotic melodies constantly dancing around each other in a perpetually disorienting way. It lurches forward asymetrically, grooving like a flat tire. The instrumental “Da Na” follows, drawing on a familiar yet slightly uncanny palette of sounds. The clarinet (?) drifts in and out of dissonance as if drunk. The tuned percussion elements flit around what might be a kenari seed shell shaker or someone running their fingers over the tines of a comb. It’s truly impossible to tell, and both seem as likely as the other. 

“Sayonara (Full Moon Version)” is the fantastical daydream counterpart to Oingo Boingo’s nightmare new wave theatrics. The least strange track on the record is probably “Plans,” which fully embraces ’80s dance pop aesthetics. But even that song finds room for a minute-long instrumental passage featuring a bleating, almost atonal saxophone solo.

While the sounds are strange, uneasy, and almost queasy at times, the songs are light and fantastical. Despite not understanding the lyrics, which are mostly in Russian, it’s impossible not to get a sense of hope from them. Kate NV’s Room for the Moon is not a somber lunar lullaby, but the pleasant dreams of an innocent mind.

Kate NV’s Room for the Moon is available on Bandcamp and most major streaming services, including Qobuz, Deezer, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Spotify.

Rockstar confirmed on Saturday that some of its data was compromised in a breach of a third-party provider. The group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility, saying it had gained access to the company’s Snowflake instances (a cloud-hosting provider popular with enterprise customers) via Anodot, a cost-monitoring and analytics service. The group is demanding a ransom by April 14th, or it will leak the data it has stolen.

In a statement provided to Kotaku, the company said that the compromised data was limited in scope and “this incident has no impact on our organization or our players.”

It’s unclear exactly which data was compromised, but it appears the hack targeted corporate data rather than player information. It’s possible that financial records, marketing data, or contracts with companies like Sony and Microsoft could be included in the haul.

This isn’t the first time Rockstar has been the victim of a high-profile hack. In 2022, a huge cache of videos from GTA VI were leaked online by Lapsus$.

Dutch regulators, the RDW, announced that after over a year and a half of testing, it has officially approved Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) Supervised. This makes the Netherlands the first European country to authorize the use of FSD on its roads. This could open the door to wider adoption throughout the EU. Tesla’s European headquarters is located in Amsterdam, so it’s only fitting that the country is the first to embrace the company’s FSD.

In a statement announcing the approval, the RDW said that, “Using driver assistance systems correctly makes a positive contribution to road safety because the driver is supported in their driving tasks; it is a supplement to the driver. Through continuous strict monitoring of the driver in the vehicle, the system is safer than other driver assistance systems.”

The update implementing FSD Supervised (version 2026.3.6) has started rolling out to a limited number of users. Drivers will need to watch a tutorial and take a quiz before self-driving can be enabled, which reminds people that FSD Supervised “does not make your vehicle autonomous. Do not become complacent.”

Tesla’s FSD has faced some challenges in the US recently, including an investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that could lead to a recall. But it also recently ended an investigation.