Theo on tech · June 16th

What’s odd is that AMD quietly pulled the Transparent Secure Memory Encryption feature from its consumer Ryzen line, something they’d been adding for years to guard against cold‑boot attacks.

The change shows up only on Windows as a silent drop, while on Linux you have to hunt through kernel logs to see the flag disappear. No notice, no explanation—just a terse reply that TSME is now a PRO‑only tech.

People who grew used to that extra layer feel blindsided, especially since the hardware itself hasn’t changed; it’s just a firmware tweak. Until AMD clarifies why they rolled it back, the community is left guessing and a bit uneasy.

The UK government announced today that it will ban social media for all kids under the age of 16 in rules expected to take effect in spring 2027. The ban will apply to platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X. "We’re going further than any country in the world by banning social media for under-16s and putting wider protections in place to give kids their childhood back," Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in the announcement. In addition to the ban on social media, Starmer's government said it will impose "world-leading blocks on harmful functions such as livestreaming and stranger communication with children for under-16s... Restrictions on these functionalities will also be on by default for 16- and 17-year-olds to prevent a cliff-edge at 16." The livestreaming and stranger-contact rules would apply to a range of services, such as online gaming.

Fox is buying Roku for $22 billion, combining Fox's sports, news, entertainment, Tubi, and Fox One offerings with a streaming platform that reaches about 100 million people. The companies say the merger would create the "third-largest player in US television by share of viewing," while Fox insists Roku will remain open to competing apps after the deal closes. CNN reports: Fox has dabbled in streaming over the past few years -- finally launching its Fox One competitor last August -- but has lacked a serious streaming business with the ability to compete in a space dominated by YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, HBO Max, Paramount+ and Peacock. With CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery receiving initial US regulatory approval to combine with Paramount, Fox's purchase of Roku became more urgent. [...] The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027 with the companies forecasting $400 million in savings. "This is a defining moment for Fox, and a natural extension of the deliberate and focused strategy we have been executing for nearly a decade," said Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch. "Today, we take the next step: bringing together the most valuable live content portfolio in video consumption with the preeminent streaming platform through which America watches it." Murdoch said Roku will continue to offer competing apps. "It's essential that Roku remain open and partner-friendly business. We don't see that changing at all."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A decade ago, AMD added a protection to its high-end CPUs to protect them against cold boot attacks and other types of physical exploits that siphon sensitive data out of the connected memory chips. Short for Transparent Secure Memory Encryption, TSME encrypts the entire contents stored in memory, making the data useless to physical attackers. Over time, AMD added TSME to lower-end processors, including the consumer version of its Ryzen chips, a CPU that costs less than the Pro version. Over the years, users of these lower-end chips have gotten used to the added security. Recently and without warning or notice, this lower-end line of AMD chips suddenly dropped the protection, and did so in a way that was impossible to detect on Windows machines and required a fair amount of technical work when using Linux. AMD has yet to say why TSME worked on these CPUs, or even to confirm the change. AMD declined to answer questions sent by email other than to say TSME "is a security feature only applied to PRO CPUs as part of AMD PRO Technologies." The statement is the first known time the chipmaker has explicitly made this restriction public. [...] There's no indication that AMD ever advertised or marketed TSME as being available in consumer CPUs. AMD has long said that a related memory protection, Secure Memory Encryption (SME), is available only in the Pro and Epyc CPU tiers. SME is OS-managed. It uses a single key and allows the OS to selectively encrypt individual memory pages. TSME is firmware-managed. It encrypts all RAM with no OS involvement. When active, it provides protection against physical attacks, including cold boot exploits, DRAM interface snooping, and memory module removal. It activates silently when enabled in the BIOS, making it the more practically useful of the two protections. Ben Kilpatrick, a self-described "privacy-conscious Linux hobbyist," discovered that TSME had stopped working on his consumer Ryzen processor despite remaining enabled in the BIOS. He spent months investigating, persuaded MSI engineers to test multiple CPUs, motherboards, and firmware versions, and filed a public AMD bug report that traced the change to newer AGESA firmware apparently disabling TSME on consumer chips while retaining it on Pro and EPYC models. "AMD engineers' comments, such as those mentioned above, and the years of TSME working just fine in the lower-cost tier processors, have understandably conditioned Kilpatrick and other users to reasonably regard it as an expected part of the chip package," reports Ars Technica. "AMD quietly removing it and providing no acknowledgment or explanation strikes these users as something of a betrayal." Joe Fitzgerald, an expert in silicon-level security, said in an interview: "They could have not realized they did it leading to their cagey responses, or they could have done it intentionally and tried to get away with it, leading to the same cagey responses. But I really feel like an explanation should be in order, even if it was 'TSME was never supposed to be supported. We did ship some firmwares that erroneously enabled it, but you shouldn't use them since we can't guarantee it'll work properly.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What’s most interesting is how the S‑1 reshapes the ownership map. SpaceX kept a tight core of founder‑controlled voting shares, but the prospectus shows a new class of non‑voting equity that will float, meaning the company can tap public capital without diluting Elon’s control. The filing also reveals a hefty pre‑IPO tranche sold to a handful of institutional investors at a discount, a move that cushions the market debut and gives those backers a built‑in upside.

On the balance sheet, you’ll see a surge in cash reserves—roughly $10 billion—mostly from the pre‑sale and a recent financing round. That cash isn’t earmarked for rockets alone; it’s earmarked for scaling Starlink, building launch infrastructure, and funding the next generation of spacecraft.

The upside for existing shareholders is the liquidity event, but the downside is the new public scrutiny. Analysts will now have to parse the same confidential metrics SpaceX has long guarded, from launch cadence to satellite deployment costs, which could tighten the valuation corridor.

In short, the IPO isn’t just a headline; it’s a structural shift that lets SpaceX raise money while keeping its strategic decisions firmly in the founder’s hands, and it sets the stage for a more transparent, albeit still private‑ish, financial future.

The administration slipped a new interpretation of export‑control rules into the code, reclassifying Anthropic’s cybersecurity models as “dual‑use” tech. That meant the models had to be pulled from any U.S.‑based cloud service, even though the original paperwork never mentioned a jailbreak scenario. The shift wasn’t about a specific vulnerability; it was a legal pivot that let regulators treat the models like weapons rather than research tools.

Anthropic’s response was swift: they disabled the affected models, rerouted workloads to non‑U.S. infrastructure, and warned customers that the service would be unavailable until the paperwork cleared. The move caught the industry off‑guard because the policy change was buried in a routine amendment, not a headline‑grabbing announcement.

What this shows is that the government can retroactively apply existing statutes to AI products, turning a compliance issue into a strategic lever. Companies now have to audit every model for “dual‑use” risk, not just the ones that look obviously risky.

In practice, the ban sends a quiet but firm reminder: the AI landscape is subject to the same geopolitical tug‑of‑war as traditional tech, and the rules can shift without a public debate.

Fox Corporation has agreed to buy Roku Inc. for $160 per share, an approximate enterprise value of $22 billion, the firms announced today. The acquisition would unite Fox’s broadcast channels, including Fox, Fox News, Fox Business, and FS1, as well as its streaming businesses, including Tubi, a free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) platform that Fox bought in 2020, with Roku’s own FAST service, The Roku Channel, and Roku’s streaming hardware business, including its streaming sticks and smart TVs. Roku says it has 100 million households using its platform. The most valuable part of Roku’s business isn't its hardware, which lost $19.1 million in the quarter ending March 31, 2026, but its the operating system (Roku OS) and advertising business. In that same quarter, Roku’s advertising and subscriptions business posted a gross profit of $584.1 million, with the advertising business pulling in $371 million in revenue. The COVID-19 pandemic helped Roku become profitable in 2021, but the company didn’t see annual profitability again until 2025.

The upper stage from a commercial Chinese rocket that launched last week has broken apart in space, spreading debris in a heavily trafficked part of low-Earth orbit home to the International Space Station and a significant portion of SpaceX's Starlink broadband network. The breakup occurred shortly after the Zhuque-2E rocket reached orbit on June 9 with two satellites providing direct-to-cell communications, perhaps around the time the upper stage was expected to perform a disposal burn. The US Space Force confirmed the breakup event in a post on space-track.org, a website used by the military to distribute orbit data to the public. "The tracked pieces are being incorporated into routine conjunction assessment to support spaceflight safety," the Space Force wrote in an advisory. "There are currently no threats to human spaceflight. Analysis is ongoing."

Chipmaker Nvidia is planning to sell $25 billion of investment-grade debt in the US on Monday, its first bond sale in five years, in a test of investor appetite for further exposure to the AI sector. In a marquee seven-part bond offering, the company will issue a wide range of maturities from two years to 30 years, according to a term sheet seen by the FT. The issuance was upsized from $20 billion after receiving more than $85 billion in orders by early afternoon in New York, according to people familiar with the deal.

Although most Americans have eschewed seasonal COVID-19 vaccines, the updated shots continue to show significant protection against cardiovascular disease, especially for those over age 75 and those with underlying medical conditions. That's according to a new study that pulled data from more than 1 million patients in a US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health system. The finding builds on previous data showing that the vaccines significantly lower the risk of COVID-19-associated cardiovascular risks, particularly heart attacks and strokes. But it wasn't a given that the benefit would hold up over time—as the virus evolved, the vaccines were updated, population-level immunity increased from previous infection and vaccination, and risk of severe outcomes fell. The new study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that the 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine continued to protect against COVID-19-associated "major adverse cardiovascular events" (MACE), which include cardiovascular death, heart attack, stroke, and hospitalization for heart failure.