Tech News Weekly 430 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Tech News Weekly, Dan Moren subbing in for Emily Forleni. We kick off the show by talking about the rumors for iOS 27 and that finally AI reboot of Siri. Then I talk about some drama that went down for a company that Apple attempted to acquire. Afterwards, Sean Hollister of The Verge stops by to tell us about that consumer router ban in the US. And I round things out with a story about NASA's upcoming plans. Plans for the moon and for Mars. Stay tuned for this episode of Tech News Weekly.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:47]:
This is Tech News Weekly, episode 430, with Dan Moren and me, Mikah Sargent. Recorded Thursday, March 26th, 2026. Understanding the US router ban. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am your host, Mikah Sargent, and the wonderful Emily Forlini is out this week and will be for a while. As you might recall, uh, Emily did share with us that she had or was going to be having a baby, and she did indeed have a baby. So congratulations to her and her family. Um, But joining us today is Dan Moren, East Coast Bureau Chief of SixColors.com.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:35]:
Hello, Dan.

Dan Moren [00:01:36]:
Hello, Mikah. I too have a baby, but he's 3 years old now, so I can't even— I can't claim that anymore. The statute of limitations has expired.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:45]:
I was going to say, I really can't. I did that new calculation, the new formula that they came up with for dog aging. And yeah, it's a— I can't remember what the the— it's like a logarithm or something. Anyway, point is, my dogs are like 87 and 70-something.

Dan Moren [00:02:08]:
They look great.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:09]:
So for their age, they're not— they're not babies, they're not kids. Yeah. Uh, anywho, that's not what we're here to talk about, dog ages. Uh, although I should start a podcast called The Dog Ages. And that is again distracting me from the point, which is that this is the part of the show where we share our stories of the week with you all. So Dan, tell us, what story have you picked?

Dan Moren [00:02:32]:
All right, stop me if you've heard this one before. Apple is going to fix Siri with some AI. Does that sound at all familiar? Is anybody— anybody remember that?

Mikah Sargent [00:02:43]:
I think I've seen advertisements about that.

Dan Moren [00:02:45]:
Ah, that was just your imagination. Yeah, well, it's back. It's back. The thing they never did is gonna happen for sure this time. Um, Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg reports that Apple is testing a new approach for Siri that will probably debut as part of the iOS 27/MacOS 27 updates. Which will probably be unveiled at the Worldwide Developers Conference, which Apple announced this week would be happening starting June 8th. So what does this actually mean? Well, there's a lot of things that obviously Apple has wrestled with in the artificial intelligence realm over the last few years. A couple years back, they announced a bunch of cool features which turned out to not exist, and they never shipped them.

Dan Moren [00:03:25]:
Uh, last year they promised that those things would ship in the coming year, giving themselves a lot of leeway. If you're keeping track, that was about, oh, 10 months ago and they still haven't shipped. So things seem to be progressing very well. What this is largely going to look like is modernizing Siri. Now, we've heard for a while the idea that they're going to use some artificial intelligence models to back Siri, but this seems to suggest that it's going to go a little farther than that. They're going to revamp the interface to make it more chatbot-like, which is to say, to make it much more familiar to those of us who are already using things like ChatGPT or Claude. And so you'll be able to chat with Siri. You'll have different conversation threads.

Dan Moren [00:04:06]:
It'll kind of look a little bit— it sounds like, um, similar to Apple's own Messages app, but instead of talking to your friends, you're talking to a robot who is not really your friend, but maybe your friend. It's unclear. Uh, hopefully they're not your only friend. That's not a good situation to be in. Um, this is codenamed Campo, and it adds some other capabilities as well. Um, more closely integrating with things like your personal data, such as your messages, your notes, your email. So it will be able to like do things within those apps. It'll be able to search the web, and it will have all of those functionalities sort of tied into this personal context idea that they've talked about in the past.

Dan Moren [00:04:50]:
Now, you know, again, we kind of made light of this, but certainly this feature has been in the offing for some time. I think we're at a point now where Apple is very much in a, uh, uh, like ship it or shut up mode where it's kind of— it's got to get it done, right? I mean, last year they, they made some, you know, allotments for the fact that things weren't matching the, the bar of their quality. Uh, this year I think we're a little further along and, you know, they kind of put a line in the sand saying it would ship in the coming year and it feels like, well, if it's not going to happen when they announce these 27 upgrades, then When is it going to happen? But the question hovering over everybody's minds is, can they actually do this? Will it actually work? And that we're not going to know for some time. There's obviously been some behind-the-scenes drama. They've announced that they are going to be using Google's Gemini models to back a lot of their technology. It's unclear how that ties in with the Siri stuff exactly. Gurman's report does suggest that there will be Apple-built models involved somehow. It is unclear to me exactly what that means.

Dan Moren [00:05:56]:
It seems Evident that Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg has at least gotten a glimpse of one possible way this is going to look, because he's got a lot of descriptions about how things would go. Like, you know, currently Siri's animation, for example, is this thing where the whole screen kind of shimmers and you see like a rainbow effect around the edge of the screen. He suggests that they're testing an interface that would move Siri to within the Dynamic Island. Um, there's an interesting question there because not every iPhone sold currently even has the Dynamic Island, much less every iPhone that's capable of running iOS 27. So how that would look on different devices, fair question.

Mikah Sargent [00:06:37]:
Isn't there that rule, uh, no one puts baby in the island?

Dan Moren [00:06:43]:
Nobody puts baby on the— we've got to go back to the island, Mikah. That's what it's all about. Um, Yeah, so a lot of questions here. I mean, obviously the Liquid Glass update in iOS 26 has provided some new interface conventions that Apple will be playing with as well. And so how this will integrate with that is an interesting question. Gurman suggests that there will be sort of a translucent panel that comes down with search results, for example, that you'll be able to pull down and interact further. But, you know, the big improvements here seem to really revolve around this idea of like Siri truly being an interactive chatbot where there are things like, you know, context and memory, right? Like you talk to ChatGPT or Claude within the course of at least one thread and it knows things that have happened before. That's not the case with Siri as it stands today.

Dan Moren [00:07:34]:
So that's one of the things that people have been sort of looking forward to the most, I think, is this idea that, well, hey, we already, we already have all these, you know, intelligent agents that we converse with. Siri, by comparison, seems only a little bit smarter than dealing with like a phone tree. Um, you know, is this actually going to bring it up to snuff? Uh, and that's the big question. So I, I don't know, Mikah. I mean, you and I have both used Siri for a very long time. I, there are things that it's good at, but I feel like it's— my use of Siri is extremely proscribed right now within a certain realm of things that I trust it to do. And it's very good at those things as long as you kind of— it kind of reminds me of using the command line, right? Like if you know exactly the command to issue Siri, then it will be pretty good about being reliable about that. But if you start to diverge too much outside of the like, okay, I'm gonna ask for something in exactly this way, it starts to quickly get out of its depth.

Dan Moren [00:08:35]:
And that's the kind of thing I think they're trying to fix here. And the big challenge, I think, looking at this from a larger sort of, you know, zoomed out point of view, is people have become so accustomed to dealing with Siri or not dealing with Siri and its various flaws.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:49]:
Yeah.

Dan Moren [00:08:50]:
Will they give it a fair shake if it's like, hey, we added all these things to Siri now, or is that just a big barrier for people to overcome in terms of being willing to actually use it?

Mikah Sargent [00:09:01]:
Can I ask, do you— of course you and I both will be testing it, right? And there's— I've realized that for myself before, what I would do is I wouldn't quite separate contextually my testing of things and my actual usage of them. And so in my mind, I had sort of overestimated how much I was using certain technology. I'm trying to be better about that. So of course, I know that both of us will be trying this out. Without knowing what it's going to look like for sure, do you, do you feel like you can see yourself giving this a fair shake outside of testing? Or have you, do you have such inbuilt kind of muscle memory for the way that you do things now that it would be a steep uphill climb to get to, that this would need to prove to you that it would do something that would be worth using?

Dan Moren [00:09:59]:
I think one of the big challenges is that Siri is a, uh, a, I don't even know what to call it. Siri is an interface that I use on a bunch of different devices, whether it's an iPhone or a watch or an Apple TV, not really Apple TV, but a HomePod. We use it on the HomePod quite a bit. And so if this is not something that rolls out to all of those products, that gets challenging, right? Because now all of a sudden you have a, an agent who on your phone might be capable of doing a lot more. But when you're speaking to it on your HomePod, may be able, it may still be like kind of limited to the way that the old Siri was limited. So now you have to do some context switching depending on which thing you're using. And does it sort of default to a lowest common denominator? Am I not gonna use it on my phone? Because it's like, well, I'm still thinking in the mindset of somebody who's using it for their, in their HomePod, in like the kitchen as this sort of ambient device. So I don't know.

Dan Moren [00:10:56]:
I mean, I, I certainly will attempt to do my best to give it a fair shake. Um, but yeah, am I going to ask it things that are really complex to see if it can do them? I'm gonna, I'm gonna do my best, but I, the, it, I guess the success of that depends how much that will reinforce my desire to use it for those things going forward. And certainly more complex tasks. I mean, just before we started here, we were talking about like using some of these, uh, you know, Claude and stuff like this that can do things on your devices now, right? And like people have gotten kind of starting to embark upon that. Siri has the advantage of already being there and built in and the ability to like hook into all your stuff. Um, and I think that's, that's also a big risk for Apple because as we've seen with a lot of these agents, when you hook them up to your stuff, there's the danger of things going wrong. There's the danger of it not just like, oh, okay, this slowed me down by opening a million tabs, for example, but also like, I deleted all your files very helpfully. Oh.

Dan Moren [00:11:54]:
You've— you forgot to do your taxes. Let's just erase all evidence they were ever there. And now you don't even need to worry about it. So reliability is always going to be paramount, I think, in this situation. And so we'll have to— we'll have to see, like, and that's— that's going to be— well, that's just it.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:09]:
It's—

Dan Moren [00:12:09]:
we're going to have to see not only there, but like, you know, Apple tests these things, right? They test these things. They're going to roll them out. But the world of AI and LLMs, means that the testing you can do, you can never do enough testing. There's too many. It's so variable and so non-deterministic that if you and I maybe ask even for the same thing, it could give us different answers. And there's no way for them to test every single possible outcome of something like that if it's truly using some of these like large language models. And so stuff's going to happen that they don't expect. And the question is, is that The edge cases, or is that the majority? And we will literally not know until it gets out into the wider world.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:56]:
Yeah, we have to wait and see. There's obviously, I mean, I'm excited to see what Apple unveils next and how this all turns out. And I will be eager to see if the company can convince me that I'm going to want to use this in the long run. I remember being excited about this contextual visually aware Siri and then it not happening and that kind of putting a bad taste in my mouth, at least in terms of how much the company marketed it. So, um, yeah, I think Apple, as you've said, has a, has a hill to climb. Uh, and it will be running up that hill to make a deal with you and I. Anyway, let's say at the top of the hill, I don't know what's happening.

Dan Moren [00:13:44]:
Why are we up there?

Mikah Sargent [00:13:46]:
I don't know why I'm here. Ah, let's take a quick break and we'll come back with more. I want to tell you about our first sponsor of today's episode of Tech News Weekly. It's Hoxhunt bringing you this episode. As a security leader, look, you've been there. The eye rolls during training, the one-size-fits-all phishing simulations that your employees spot from a mile away, and the report button that gets ignored more often than not. Your programs are running, but it's just not changing employee behavior. Meanwhile, AI is making real attacks more convincing by the day, and leadership is starting to ask the questions you don't have a clear answer to.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:27]:
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Mikah Sargent [00:16:16]:
And of course, we thank Hoxhunt for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. All right, we are back from the break, joined this week by Dan Moren of SixColors, and it is time for my story of the week. If you out there have ever used the Halide Camera app on your iPhone, you know it's one of the best examples examples of what a small independent developer can do with Apple's hardware. But behind the scenes, the company that makes it, LuxOptics, seems to be falling apart. As reported by Aaron Tilley at The Information, Apple held talks to acquire LuxOptics as a whole last summer, and when those talks fell through, Apple instead started recruiting one of the company's co-founders. What followed is a messy co-founder breakup involving accusations of fraud, stolen intellectual property, and a lawsuit that raises some questions about how Apple deals with the smaller companies in its ecosystem. So let's start with the setup. How did this all kind of kick off? Well, LuxOptics has been something arguably of like a poster child for Apple's App Store.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:23]:
We've seen it featured plenty of times. It's been on stage. It's always kind of been one of the first companies to release new technology. Um, well, release new versions that make use of Apple's technology. It was founded in 2015 by Ben Sandofsky and Sebastian DeWitt. It's a The company Lux Optics is what built Halide. And I, at last blush, was the most popular paid camera app on the App Store. Uh, Apple loved Lux Optics and Halide.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:56]:
It won an Apple Design Award in 2022. Uh, there was also Spectre that was named Apple's best iPhone app of 2019, and Kino, which got the same honor in 2024. That's Kino, K-I-N-O, not Keynote, to be clear. Apple even featured Lux in a report aimed at regulators to show how a small US developer could thrive on the platform. Last summer, Apple reportedly held acquisition talks with Lux. According to the lawsuit, Apple employees told the startup that its intellectual property was a major factor in evaluating the company, which of course makes sense because Halide gives users fine-grained manual control over the iPhone camera hardware, and Apple has been working to upgrade its own built-in camera app. Uh, in the article, it talks about how the camera in Apple's upcoming iPhone 18 Pro models will Somehow begin to match professional-grade cameras and certain advanced features. So, you know, let's get some software to go along with it.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:53]:
But in September, the deal fell through. Both co-founders agreed to walk away with DeWitt reportedly suggesting that future Luxe software releases could position them for a better offer from Apple down the line. But then the breakup, uh, in October, Sandovsky discovered that this is, of course, according to the report, uh, DeWitt had charged nearly $7,560 $1,000 to the company's American Express card for an Air France ticket from Frankfurt to Paris to São Paulo. When questioned, DeWitt said it was for a later business trip to Japan and claimed he never received a confirmation email. Then Sandofsky hired an investigator in November. It found that there was a pattern of DeWitt using the corporate credit card for personal expenses. Here are some of the allegations. April 2023, DeWitt charged the company for airfare to French Polynesia for a babymoon Uh, that also included a ticket for his girlfriend.

Mikah Sargent [00:19:54]:
And the lawsuit alleges that personal purchases for lodging and clothing and alcohol, which resulted in more than $150,000 in what the lawsuit claims is improper charges. Now, DeWitt says— DeWitt's attorney says that's not the case. It's a, quote, retroactive recharacterization of ordinary disclosed business activity in a small company that was jointly managed without formal controls. And so this seems to be, according to the back and forth, a he said, he said situation. Uh, DeWitt was placed on paid leave in November and then fired from the company in December. Apple hired DeWitt in January. Now, Dan, I remember this Um, acquis— not acquisition, but this hire, uh, being, you know, sent around, being, being announced, and everybody kind of talking about DeWitt being joining Apple and this was a good thing. We didn't hear about any of this drama that was behind the scenes.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:00]:
I don't even think— I know I didn't know, I don't know if you did, that DeWitt was fired from LuxOptics. I thought that he was moving from LuxOptics to Apple. Is that how you had it or did you?

Dan Moren [00:21:12]:
Yeah, I didn't. I, I should say as a disclaimer, I've met Sebastian, but it's been many, many years since we've really corresponded or anything. Um, and so I do remember this going around as well, and it was kind of lauded at the time because this is coming in this sort of post-Allen Dye era where people were very, uh, excited about the possibility that the, uh, interface design would get some sort of, you know, overhaul. And, and I think DeWitt is regarded as a very talented designer and somebody who kind of understands the assignment, as it were. So this was kind of under wraps, and I imagine if there was sort of legal action brewing, that might have been one reason we didn't hear more about it at the time. As always with these cases, you know, you got to be careful about exactly how you judge this information. Um, it's obvious that Sandovsky has a lot of allegations in this lawsuit. Um, you know, until this goes to trial, if it does go to trial, you never know, it could get settled out of court.

Dan Moren [00:22:12]:
Et cetera. But until that point, you know, when DeWitt has a chance to respond, we won't necessarily know his side of the story. But part of me does wonder if this could unfortunately tarnish that hire because it ends up, you know, getting mired in this sort of, you know, mudslinging situation here. So I was not aware of that when the announcement of his employment at Apple broke, certainly. And it does seem like that's tied up in some of the challenges here. There's kind of an undercurrent running through because there's also some allegations, I believe, that he's sort of taken privileged information from what he learned at Lux. And potentially, you know, is that a violation of the terms of employment, what have you? There's a lot of legal wrangling to get undone here. And it's unfortunate to see, especially an app that's so highly decorated and highly regarded, get tarnished by this kind of behind-the-scenes drama.

Dan Moren [00:23:11]:
I'm sure it won't matter to the average person who wants to use this app, but I think a lot of people are kind of in the know, and that tends to be a lot of the people using this app because it is a very power user-focused photography app, are going to be exactly the kind of people who are also aware of this kind of back and forth. So yeah, until we sort of see how the case progresses, it's hard to get a better read on what exactly is going down there and whether or not this will affect, uh, DeWitt's employment with Apple at all.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:37]:
Yeah, that's kind of what I'm interested too. Uh, there's one aspect of this that, you know, the lawsuit says that while DeWitt was on paid leave, um, that's when he began to communicate with Apple about a job instead of the acquisition. Um, the Apple contact person for his interviews had reportedly been involved in the earlier acquisition talks. Um, after the termination, continued interviewing with Apple, announced he joined Apple's design team, and lawsuit says that even after joining Apple, DeWitt still had the confidential materials related to Lux's future product development. And that, um, he— the lawsuit claims that he took the Apple Design Award, specifically the physical award that the company won in 2022. Uh, we may remember that DeWitt is the— was the lead designer on the, um, on the, the project, or that at the company, like his, his thing was design, I guess is the best way to put it. Um, DeWitt's attorney denied that any Lux intellectual property was used, transferred, disclosed, and said, quote, the attempt to insert Apple into this dispute appears designed to create leverage and attract attention, not to address any actual misconduct. But we do need to look, I think, for a moment at least, at the Aqua Hire acquisition, Aqua Fire, Aqua 4, Aqua Fires of, of this, uh, of Apple.

Mikah Sargent [00:25:11]:
Um, you know, Apple's not named as a defendant, doesn't accuse the company of wrongdoing, but interestingly, it does draw a direct parallel to the Mossimo case where Apple discussed a partnership over blood oxygen sensing technology Then hired away a bunch of Masimo employees who went on to work at Apple's, uh, work on Apple's own health tech. And then jury, a jury did award Masimo money. Uh, Apple faces antitrust scrutiny, obviously. The DOJ sues Apple in 2024. And we've went on from there. Um, I believe it was, yeah, Aiden Buzzetti, president of the Bull Moose Project, told The Information, quote, I think we need stricter scrutiny from the government to see the circumstances in which decisions are being made when hiring takes place, because a company can't come to a merger agreement. That's a lot of fluff and stuff to basically say, you know, when you, when you're talking about, uh, acquiring a company and then you hire somebody, maybe that's something we should look at.

Dan Moren [00:26:11]:
Or a lot of the people, right? I mean, certainly. Yeah. And this is nothing new in Silicon Valley. I mean, there's a lot of interplay between a lot of these big tech companies, especially because they're so large and because they have so many overlapping areas of interest. You know, in recent, in recent months, we've seen a lot of hires from Meta of Apple AI people, for example, you know, John Gianandrea, who used to be in charge of the Apple AI stuff, came from Google. Right. You know, in some ways, because this Silicon Valley is largely a place of giant companies that are working in these similar spheres, you're going to have a lot of back and forth. What's interesting here is that we're talking about like like a very small company, right, with like only a couple people in it.

Dan Moren [00:26:53]:
And so if you hire away one of the design— you know, a designer who works and is essentially half of a company after refusing to buy out the other half of the company, um, it feels awkward, right? Like, yeah, you know, and, and certainly that's the thing that you have to consider, right? You always consider the source. And so, uh, it's— you look at something like the Ben Sandowski suing him and saying, well, is he, is he just mad that he didn't get bought out, uh, with Apple? Is that part of it? He feels betrayed and therefore he's going to leverage all of this to, you know, sue his co-founder?

Sean Hollister [00:27:25]:
We don't know.

Dan Moren [00:27:26]:
I mean, but like, you know, that you have to give as much credence to that as you do to the allegations because that's just the, the way it works. You gotta look at both sides of it. So, um, until again, until more information comes to light and, you know, this is going to be potentially, uh, no fun for anybody because if they go to a trial and go through discovery, a lot a lot of stuff is going to come out probably, and I don't think anybody's going to look great necessarily.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:49]:
That's what Jason Snell was saying on MacBreak Weekly about this, uh, was, you know, careful. Um, I will say as a former news anchor, I appreciate the more open nature of, of Silicon Valley. Um, for anyone who's ever had that role as a news anchor, you have to sign contracts that say— at least this was in Missouri— you have to sign contracts that say that you won't join a competing news— like, you have to basically move your life, uh, in order to get another job when you are a news anchor somewhere else. It's, it's a very difficult thing, um, the, the non-compete clauses of it all.

Dan Moren [00:28:32]:
So, uh, moving out west and different states have different rules about this too, which is also Massachusetts, I think they we are a lot more on the side of employees and there are a lot of those non-competes tend to be less enforceable. But yeah, it varies from state to state and that's a challenge because, you know, we got 50 states and, and everybody's got slightly different laws and it is tricky to navigate all of that.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:58]:
Absolutely. Well, Dan Moren, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join me today to talk about these two stories. Of course, folks can head over to sixcolors.com to check out your work, but where else should they go to do so?

Dan Moren [00:29:11]:
Uh, my pleasure. Uh, for all of my stuff that I do, which is writing about tech, which is podcasting about tech and pop culture and writing novels, go to dmorrin.com. You can get links to all my books, including my latest is coming out this November, Eternity's Tomb. You can pre-order it there. Um, but oh yeah, dmorrin.com, it's all the details, it's everything you need.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:32]:
Beautiful. Thank you, Dan.

Dan Moren [00:29:33]:
Thanks, Mikah.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:35]:
Alrighty, folks, it's time to take a break before we come back with my interview this week. We'll get to that in just a moment, but before so, I want to tell you about ThreatLocker, bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. ThreatLocker's Zero Trust platform now delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of Zero Trust solutions, protecting endpoints, networks, and the cloud. See, by extending Zero Trust enforcement to cloud services and company networks, ThreatLocker ensures the devices are validated through a secure broker before connecting to platforms such as Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Asana, Google Workspace and GitHub. Even if a user is successfully phished, attackers cannot access resources unless they have possession of the user's trusted device. ThreatLocker works across all industries and provides 24/7 US-based support. It supports Windows, Mac, and Linux environments and enables comprehensive visibility and control. Rob Thackeray, end-user technical architect at Heathrow Airport, said this: ThreatLocker was the most intuitive solution we tested, and the responsiveness of the organization—the willingness to engage with us, set up a demo, and work with us on weekly audit reviews—was very good.

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Mikah Sargent [00:31:38]:
Visit threatlocker.com/twit to get a free 30-day trial and learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com/twit. And of course, we thank ThreatLocker for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. All right, we are back from the break, and as promised, it's time for that interview. The FCC just dropped a ban on future consumer— that is, dropped a ban as in made it here on future consumer routers made outside the US. And it's a move that could reshape possibly the entire home networking market. Now, the justification: national security. But we'll have to see about the motivations behind everything.

Mikah Sargent [00:32:22]:
There's a lot to unpack here— what it means for consumers, what it means for the industry, and whether any of this actually makes us safer. Here to break it all down is The Verge's Sean Hollister. Welcome, Sean. Thank you for having me. Yeah, pleasure to get you here. And I'm so glad that you covered this because I know this is one of those stories that I will be getting questions on. So I can go, well, Sean told me, and that's where we get to go from there. So the FCC— I appreciate that.

Mikah Sargent [00:32:49]:
Yeah, absolutely. The FCC recently made a pretty big move when it comes to consumer routers. Uh, can you walk us through what exactly happened and then kind of give us an understanding of what this ban entails.

Sean Hollister [00:33:01]:
Yes, very specifically, very specifically, the FCC is keeping routers from being imported, marketed, or sold in the United States if they are made, if a major portion of them is developed in another country. So foreign consumer routers, consumer routers specifically, are the ones that are being, uh, that future, future devices are being banned in the United States, uh, so they can't come here, you can't market them, can't sell them. But foreign routers is an interesting way of phrasing it because that's basically all consumer routers. Basically anything that, uh, that is made, um, that would move packets of internet traffic and network traffic around your home, it's not produced here, it's produced elsewhere, right? Even if the company is a United States company, uh, Netgear in San Jose, Cisco Silicon Valley, um, Linksys, all of these companies, they don't make the routers here. They haven't for a long time, any more than Apple makes its MacBooks and Macs here, right? We know these computers, they don't come from here. And so to say that you're going to ban the foreign routers because you're worried about national security, you're basically just saying you're banning all the routers. So what is this actually about?

Mikah Sargent [00:34:19]:
All right, so based on that, if someone at home home is hearing this and then they're looking and they're going, oh God, I've got a router and I know I didn't make it and I don't think it was made in the U.S. Oh, I looked at the bottom, it says made in China. Uh, what do they need to know? Are existing routers affected? Is someone going to come and take my router away from me?

Sean Hollister [00:34:39]:
Uh, of course, the government is not going to take your router away. I promise they're not going to take your router away. The FCC promises they're not going to take your router But this kind of undercuts the whole argument that there's security concern here too, because if there's nothing wrong with your existing router, then how do they justify banning routers over security concerns? But yeah, so, so they're not mandating, mandating, the FCC is not mandating anything. They're not mandating you stop using the router. They're not saying the government's going to stop using these routers. They're not saying you got to go patch your routers. There's no recall. There's nothing.

Sean Hollister [00:35:17]:
All of it is these companies are being shaken down, maybe, so that they can, if they want to bring future routers into the United States, future routers, the FCC has to authorize the radios of any new gadget that comes into the United States to make sure there isn't any harmful interference, to make sure that if you put a router out there, it's not going to, you know, interfere with a plane or a drone or an emergency radio broadcast, a signal, you know, from between a dispatcher and firefighters and paramedics. Not that those are on the same frequencies necessarily at all, but the FCC helps make sure of that. Now it's using this same power to keep certain kinds of gadgets from coming into the United States unless these companies make special deals with the government.

Mikah Sargent [00:36:05]:
Now in this, the FCC of course is pointing to Volt Typhoon, Salt Typhoon, that's why we have to do this. From what you found, I mean, it's— you've covered this a lot in what you've said so far, but what, what can you tell us about which routers were targeted in the attacks regarding Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, um, and why maybe that argument doesn't hold weight?

Sean Hollister [00:36:33]:
So if you're thinking about these gigantic cybersecurity attacks that lots of routers were kind of commandeered, maybe turned into a botnet so that hackers could use the power of all these, you know, all these enterprise routers, all these consumer routers to get at networks. If you're trying to say that that was a foreign thing, you'd be right in that Chinese hackers tried to commandeer these routers. At least that's what the government said, and I don't see any reason to disbelieve them on account. Chinese hackers might have been involved in this, but did they target Chinese routers? Not necessarily. Netgear and Cisco, these, these U.S. companies that we would think would be designing the routers, making sure they're secure and safe— those were some of the routers that they went after. And one of the reasons they were able to go after these routers is not because they were Chinese, it's because the telecom giants didn't necessarily put secure passwords on them, did not necessarily buy new ones or patch them properly. It's very basic cybersecurity practices that were not followed by US infrastructure.

Sean Hollister [00:37:44]:
And that's how they were able to get in, is our understanding of the situation. Wow. Okay.

Mikah Sargent [00:37:49]:
Now, one thing seems to kind of stand out here, and it's, it's this approach, right, of, of Sometimes you get these mandates from the government and they don't quite have a rollout of, of what's going to happen, what you need to do. The FCC, at least kindly, has laid out a path for router makers to apply for this conditional approval to keep selling new products in the US. Can you tell us a little bit more about this process? Anything noticeably or notably absent from the requirements? Like, are there strict security standards involved in the, in the process?

Sean Hollister [00:38:28]:
I feel like maybe you've read my explainer on The Verge. About the US router ban, because you're setting me up for this. Uh, the— you would think, I, I would think that if the US government is concerned about the security of these routers and it want— and it's going to be doing these negotiations with various companies, that one of the things it would ask for is, please show us, various Chinese and US companies that want to bring your routers into the States, please show us that you're going to improve the security of these devices, that you're going to patch them on a regular schedule, that you're going to make sure that they are fixed, that they are better, that they are not going to lead to these kinds of attacks. There are zero, zero questions about cybersecurity in the list of conditions for, for approval of these, of these new routers that these companies want to bring into the United States. What is in this list of conditional approval? It's a lot of questions about where they are made, who they are made by, and a huge section on a U.S. manufacturing and onshoring plan. What the U.S. government wants from these companies is a promise that they will start making routers in the United States, that they will commit a certain amount of money to doing that over the next 1 to 5 years.

Sean Hollister [00:39:49]:
And so, uh, there are as many questions about that as about anything else in the conditional approval. So if you want to get your routers into the United States, companies, you need a detailed time-bound plan to establish or expand manufacturing in the United States. And it says very specifically, in order for that device to qualify for FCC authorization, the FCC is not being coy about this. There are many questions about, oh yeah, tell us where they come from Tell Us the Government Influence. This point very specifically says, if you want authorization, you're going to give us your plan and tell us how much money you're going to spend on U.S. manufacturing, which isn't the worst thing, I suppose. Yeah, let's bring, let's bring manufacturing back to the United States. Let's bring jobs back to the United States.

Sean Hollister [00:40:37]:
If that's what the Trump administration actually believes they could do, if that is a realistic goal, I don't mind that. But everything we've seen from this administration is that they simply want to look good. Trump wants to look good. They want to get a cut of this to show that he's strong-armed various companies into doing his bidding. So I don't believe that. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:40:59]:
Speaking of sort of strong-arming other companies, you did draw a comparison to the ban that hit DJI. What did DJI do in response? And do we think that that gives us insight into how router companies will respond?

Sean Hollister [00:41:18]:
DJI is a bit more complicated of a situation. There is a direct parallel in that this router ban is modeled 100% off of the foreign drone ban that the US government and the FCC also implemented back in December, I believe. And so like that, like, like this ban, the foreign drone ban keeps companies from bringing new drones into the United States while saying, yep, you can keep using your existing drones. You could even— companies can even keep bringing their pre-approved drones, the previous generation of drones, into the United States. That is fine with routers, that is fine with drones. But in the case of drones, it's not lots of different companies that bring drones to the United States. There's DJI, is the big one. It is the vast majority of this.

Sean Hollister [00:42:12]:
And so, um, it's very specifically targeting DJI in that ban. The difference is— the main difference is that the government had already targeted DJI with these routers. I don't think Linksys, Netgear, um, you know, ASUS are going to have any problem getting a pre-approved existing router through customs. But with DJI, U.S. Customs was already blocking drones that had full approval to be in the United States. And so what DJI is doing is DJI is suing because it can't get itself its products here in any global, in any holistic way. It can get a few through here and there, but it can't sell its best drones in the United States because Customs is blocking them, not because of the for a drone ban. Got it.

Mikah Sargent [00:43:06]:
Now lastly, I think this is sort of the, the big, um, crystal ball question. There's been a lot of discussion about whether this is genuinely this national security measure, or as you've talked about, a bit of shakedown. Based on everything you've dug into, what— because this is big, I mean, people are going to be wondering what the heck's going on here, uh, what are the signals, do you think, that will tell us where this is really headed? What should we be looking out for other than more reporting by you, of course, when it comes to this? What are next steps?

Sean Hollister [00:43:40]:
We need to know, um, where these companies decide to land. Are they going to— your Linksys, your Netgear, your ASUS— whether, whether your router manufacturer is based in the United States or outside, are they going to apply for conditional approval and commit to U.S. manufacturing? When they do that, if they do that, are there going to be meaningful dollar figures and meaningful locations in the United States that they attach that to? Are they going to break ground on a facility? Are they going to buy up, you know, swath of territory in the US to do that? Or are they going to, like DJI is doing with its latest drones, are they going to say, we're not bringing these to the US anymore? Good luck, US, you'll figure out routers on your own. We'll see if new companies pop up to do that. The difference here, or where I do think some companies will apply for this, is that, uh, Netgear and Cisco and Linksys and a number, a number of these, uh, have history in the United States. They were, they were started here. They, they, you know, they have those ties and they don't, and they can't like say, oh, we'll just go serve China very easily because they'd be losing their home country. Whereas DJI can do that a little bit more easily.

Sean Hollister [00:44:53]:
It's a chunk of their market for drones, but it's not like they would be in this place where they have to be like, we've lost our home country and now we have to only sell with the rest of the world. So I expect some companies will indeed do this, but to what degree? Is it going to be something where they do just enough to make Trump look good? They do just enough to be like, oh yeah, yeah, we'll put some millions. Into manufacturing here, and that's good enough that, that the government can chalk it up as a win, uh, but we're going to make most of our stuff in Vietnam still, most of our stuff in China still, most of our stuff in Thailand still. Or, um, are they going to meaningfully do something here? Or maybe they— some of them sue. I don't know. Those are the stories that I'm looking out for next.

Mikah Sargent [00:45:38]:
Well, Sean, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today, to walking us through this, uh, ban and and what in the world it means. Always a pleasure to get to chat with you. If people would like to keep up to date with the work that you're doing, where are the places they should go to do so?

Sean Hollister [00:45:56]:
I am Sean Hollister at The Verge, and I am Sean Hollister on Blue Sky. Awesome.

Mikah Sargent [00:46:02]:
Thank you so much, Sean. We appreciate it. Thanks so much. Alrighty, folks, let's take a quick break. Before we come back with our final story, I want to tell you about Melissa bringing you this episode of Tech News. Weekly. Melissa is the trusted data quality expert since 1985. You know, Melissa, spring is the season for tidying up closets, garages, and frankly, your customer data.

Mikah Sargent [00:46:27]:
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Mikah Sargent [00:48:14]:
Get started today with 1,000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com/twit. That's melissa.com/twit. And of course, we thank Melissa for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. All right, we are back from the break and it is time for my final story of the week. You heard about what NASA's up to. NASA is getting serious about going back to the Moon. And this time, the agency says it's not just planting flags. In a major announcement this week dubbed "Ignition," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman laid out an ambitious roadmap that includes a 3-phase plan to build a permanent lunar base, a timeline to ramp up Artemis missions to twice a year, and a bold commitment to launch the first nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft to Mars before the end of 2028.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:06]:
Jennifer Chang reports for The New York Times, with additional details from NASA's own press release. The agency is trying to shift from the era of one-off bespoke missions to something more repeatable, more sustainable, and far more ambitious. Whether NASA can actually pull all of this off, of course, remains an open question, but the plans themselves represent a significant pivot in how the US approaches human spaceflight. Let's start with Artemis. So this program has been completely restructured. Uh, Artemis 3, previously expected to include a lunar landing, has been scaled back to simply an Earth orbit mission that's focused on testing and docking procedures. And it's actually been moved up to 2027. So this will give astronauts the chance to practice docking the Orion capsule with the lunar landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Mikah Sargent [00:50:00]:
If that test goes well, we could see 2 landing attempts in 2028 during Artemis IV and V. After Artemis V, NASA wants to increase the cadence to 2 missions per year, which would then shift to commercially procured reusable hardware. Very exciting stuff. Isaacman did frame the urgency in competitive terms, saying that the difference between success and failure will be measured in months, not years. They may be early, and recent history suggests we might be late. Now, who's the we or the, the they that they're talking about? It's China, which has said it plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2030. NASA has also put out a call for commercial companies to eventually replace the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion capsule with plans to hire at least 2 companies for that work. A lot of outsourcing here, right? But I think the thing that's sticking out to a lot of people is this moon base, the lunar base plan broken into 3 phases.

Mikah Sargent [00:51:04]:
And Isaacman was upfront that it's not going to happen quickly. The moon base will not appear overnight, unfortunately. Uh, so first, Phase 1, build, test, and learn. NASA is moving away from one-off missions and instead toward a repeatable modular approach. So small robotic landers will land via the CLPS program. Delivery of the Lunar Terrain Vehicle and tech demonstrations will focus on mobility, power generation, communications, science investigations. And after they have built, they have tested, and they have learned, then comes Phase 2, which is early infrastructure, where there will be semi-habitable infrastructure supporting regular astronaut visits, international partners will come into play here, including JAXA's pressurized rover. Then, excuse me, Phase 3: Permanent Presence.

Mikah Sargent [00:51:56]:
We're finally there. Heavier infrastructure arrives via cargo-capable human landing systems, making the shift from periodic expeditions to a true permanent base. The phase includes habitats from the Italian Space Agency, Canada's Lunar vehicle and other international contributions. Now, for those first two phases, Isaacman said NASA will invest approximately $20 billion over the next 7 years and build it through dozens of missions. Carlos Garcia-Galán, who is the program executive for the Moon Base, also said that Phase 3 would cost an additional $10 billion and involve roughly 150,000 kilograms of payload on the surface. That's made up of habitats, vehicles, of power systems, and even maybe nuclear power plants. Uh, Garcia Galán had only been working on the Moon Base concept for about 3 and a half weeks at the time that this announcement came forth. The work on another project has been kind of sort of shelved.

Mikah Sargent [00:53:04]:
Gateway, which is the small space station that was supposed to orbit the Moon has been suspended. The station's nearly complete power and propulsion element, however, will be repurposed as the engine for the SR-1 Freedom spacecraft that's headed to Mars. I have to tell you, I love— I think I talked about it when we had, um, Tarek Malik on the show— I love the scrappiness of space scientists and their ability to take technology that exists and make use of it, uh, elsewhere when it needs to. This ability to pivot is really impressive to me. Now, in order to get to Mars, we are looking at nuclear propulsion as a potential option. SR-1 Freedom which is Space Reactor One Freedom, will be the first nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft, and they want to launch it to Mars before the end of 2028. The spacecraft will use nuclear electric propulsion instead of Gateway's solar panels for a fission react— so instead of Gateway solar panels, it will instead be a fission reactor that will power the acceleration of xenon ions. NASA acknowledges that the reactor on this mission is too small to actually speed up the trip, but the point is to demonstrate that the technology will work for larger systems down the road.

Mikah Sargent [00:54:35]:
So we don't need it to be any faster. That's not the goal here. We're just trying to do something else that works and make sure that it works. So when SR-1 Freedom reaches Mars, it will deploy a payload of 3 Ingenuity-class helicopters equipped with cameras and radar to search for frozen water at a possible future astronaut landing site. Uh, some other things involved are the science missions beyond the Moon and Mars. NASA, of course, highlighted a number of ongoing and upcoming science missions. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is launching as early as this fall, plus the Dragonfly mission, which is sending a nuclear-powered octocopter to Saturn's moon Titan in 2028, and the delivery of ESA's Rosalind Franklin rover to Mars in 2028. It's also accelerating its CLPS cadence, targeting up to 30— can you believe it— robotic lunar landings starting in 2027.

Mikah Sargent [00:55:36]:
Uh, I think that this is going to be a great few years if all of this plays out for NASA, as we're seeing We're seeing sort of a message, a narrative that another space race is on. And I think that, well, from, from what I've read, that's a big part of landing on the Moon and getting territory on the Moon is beating out the others to doing so. So get ready for a modern space race. I know I'm excited. All right, folks, that is going to bring us to the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly. As always, I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you would like to check out more episodes of the show, well, you can head to twit.tv/tnw. That is where you go to subscribe, and we love, love, love, uh, having you.

Mikah Sargent [00:56:34]:
You can follow— you can subscribe to the show in audio and video formats there. Now, if you're listening to this and thinking I wonder if there are ad-free versions of the show. There are, if you can believe it. If you head to twit.tv/clubtwit, you will learn about our club. You can also scan that QR code. In doing so, you will be taken to our Club Twit page where you can subscribe to become a member. $10 a month, $120 a year gets you access to some pretty awesome things. Every single one of our shows ad-free.

Mikah Sargent [00:57:08]:
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Mikah Sargent [00:57:55]:
On top of that, we'll invite you to our Discord, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twitch members and those of us here at Twitch. The wonderful, um, one of our wonderful listeners said, who doesn't want more Mikah? Well, I can name a few people, but it sounds like the club members are not that. So if you would like more, head there, twitch.tv/clubtwit. If you'd like to follow me online, I'm @mikahsargent on many a social media network, or you can head to chihuahua.coffee. That's chihuahua.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Be sure to check out the rest of my shows, including iOS Today and Hands On Apple, which will publish later today, and Hands-On Tech, which publishes on Sundays. Thank you for being here. I'll be back again next week with another episode of Tech News Weekly. Bye!