Tech News Weekly 430: Understanding the US Router Ban

Coming up on Tech News Weekly, Dan Moran subbing in for Emily Forleini.

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 route

her ban in the U.S. and I round things out with a story about NASA's upcoming plans for the

moon and for Mars. Stay tuned for this episode of Tech News Weekly.

Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twenth.

This is Tech News Weekly, episode 430 with Dan Moran and me, Michael Sargent.

Recorded Thursday, March 26, 2026. Understanding the U.S.

router ban.

Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly. The show wherever we talk to and about the people

making an beric in that tech news. I am your host, Michael Sargent. And the wonderful Emily Forleini

is out this week and will be for a while as you might recall. 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. But joining us today is Dan Moran, east coast bureau chief of six colors.com.

Hello, Dan. Hello, Michael. I too have a baby but he's three years old now so I can't even

click. I can't claim that anymore. The statute of limitations has expired. I was going to say,

I really can't say. I did that new calculation, the new formula that they came up with for

dog aging. And yeah, I can't remember what that's like a log rhythm or something. Anyway,

point is my dogs are like 87 and 70 something. They look great. They're not babies. They're not

kids. Anywho, that's not what we're here to talk about dog ages, 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

show where we share our stories of the week with you all. So Dan, tell us what story have you picked.

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 ever seen advertisements about that? That was just

your imagination. Yeah, well, it's back. It's back. The thing they never did is going to happen for

sure this time. Mark German over Bloomberg reports that Apple is testing a new approach for Siri

that will probably debut as part of the iOS 27 slash Mac OS 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 ship them.

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 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 jet bot like, which is to say to make it much more

familiar to those of us who are already using things like chat GPT or Quad. And so you'll be able

to chat with Siri. You'll have different conversation threads. It'll kind of look a little bit,

it sounds like 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.

Hopefully they're not your only friend. That's not a good situation to be in.

This is code named Campo, and it adds some other capabilities as well, more closely

integrating with things like your personal data, such as your messages, your notes, your email.

So it will be able to do things within those apps. It'll be able to search the web,

and it will have all of those functionalities tied into this personal context idea that they've

talked about in the past. Now, 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

like shippeter shut up mode where it's got to get it done, right? I mean, last year they made some,

you know, allotments for the fact that things weren't matching the bar of their quality.

This year, I think we're a little further along, and 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 series stuff exactly.

German's report does suggest that there will be Apple built models involved somehow. It is

unclear to me exactly what that means. It seems evident that that Mark German over Bloomberg has

at least gotten a glimpse of one possible way that is going to look because he's got a lot of

descriptions about how things would go. Currently series animation, for example, is this thing where

the whole screen kind of shimmers and you see a rainbow effect around the edge of the screen.

He suggests that they're testing an interface that would move series to within the dynamic island.

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 was

up to different devices. It's our question. Isn't there that rule? No one puts baby in the island?

Nobody puts baby on it. We've got to go back to the island, Micah. That's what it's all about.

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. German 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 the big improvements here seem to really revolve around this idea of like

Siri truly being an interactive chap out where there are things like context and memory. You talk

to chat, ebt or clawed 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. 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 have all these intelligent agents that we converse with. Siri,

bike, comparison, seems only a little bit smarter than dealing with like a phone tree.

Is this actually going to bring it up to snuff? That's the big question. So I don't know, Micah.

I mean, you and I both you Siri for a very long time. 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 realm of things

that I trusted 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 going to ask for something in exactly this way. It starts to quickly get out

of its depth. 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 zoomed out point of view is people have

become so accustomed to dealing with Siri or not dealing with Siri and its various flaws.

Yeah. 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?

Can I ask, of course, you and I both will be testing it, right? And there's, I've realized it

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. And 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 that this would need to prove to you that it would do something that

would be worth using? I think one of the big challenges is that Siri is a, I don't even know what to

call, 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 home pod. We use it on the home pod 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 an agent who on your phone might be capable of doing

a lot more. But when you're speaking to it on your home pod 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 going to 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 home pod and like the kitchen as this sort of ambient

device. So I don't know. I mean, I certainly will attempt to do my best to give it a fair shake.

But yeah, are I going to ask it things that are really complex to see if it can do them?

I'm going to do my best. But 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, you know,

clawed and stuff like this that can do things on your devices now, right? And like people have

gotten kind of, you know, starting to embark upon that. Siri has the advantage of already being

there and built in in the ability to like hook into all your stuff. 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 helpful. Oh, 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. So we'll have to we'll have to see like in that's half

that's going to well, that's just it. So 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. 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 contextually-aware series. 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, yeah, I think Apple,

as you've said, has a hill to climb. And it will be running up that hill to make a deal with you and

I. Anyway, let's take a hill. I don't know what's happening. Why are we up there? I don't know why I'm

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All right, we are back from the break, joined this week by Dan Morin of six colors,

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 of what a small independent developer

can do with Apple's hardware. But behind the scenes, the company that makes it lux optics

seems to be falling apart. As reported by Aaron Tilly at the information Apple held talks to acquire

lux optics 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 and its ecosystem. So let's start with the setup. How

did this all kind of kick off? Well, lux optics has been something arguably of like a poster child

for Apple's App Store. 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, what released new versions that

make use of Apple's technology was founded in 2015 by Ben Sandowski and Sebastian DeWith.

The company lux optics is what built halide. And I at last blush was the most popular paid

camera app on the App Store. Apple loved lux optics and halide. It won an Apple design award in 2022.

There's also Spectre that was named Apple's best iPhone app of 2019 and Kino, which got the same

honor in 2024. That's Kino Kino, not Kino to be clear. Apple even featured lux in a report aimed

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 law,

suit 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. In the article, it talks about how the camera and Apple's upcoming iPhone 18

Pro models will somehow begin to match professional grade cameras in certain advanced features.

So, you know, let's get some software to go along with it. But in September, the deal fell through.

Both co-founders agreed to walk away with DeWith reportedly suggesting that future lux software

releases could position them for a better offer from Apple down the line. But then,

the breakup. In October, Sandowski discovered that this is, of course, according to the report,

DeWith had charged nearly $7,560 to the company's American Express Card for an air France ticket

from Frankfurt to Paris to Sao Paulo. When questioned, DeWith said it was for a later business trip

to Japan and claimed he never received a confirmation email. Then, Sandowski hired an investigator

in November. It found that there was a pattern of DeWith using the corporate credit card for

personal expenses. Here's some of the allegations. April 2023, DeWith charged the company for air

fare to French Polynesia for a baby moon that also included a ticket for his girlfriend.

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,

DeWith says, DeWith's turn, he 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, he said he said situation. DeWith was placed on paid leave in November

and then fired from the company in December. Apple hired DeWith in January. Now, Dan, I remember

this acquisition, but this hire being, you know, sent around, being announced and everybody

kind of talking about DeWith, being joining Apple. And this was a good thing. We didn't hear about

any of this drama that was behind the scenes. I don't even think, I know I didn't know. I don't

know if you did that DeWith was fired from Lux Optics. I thought that he was moving from Lux Optics

to Apple. Is that how you had it? Or did you? Yeah, I didn't. I had to say as this claim,

or I've met Sebastian, but it's been many, many years since we've really corresponded to anything.

And so I do remember this going around as well. And it was kind of lauded at the time because

this is coming in the sort of post-Allen die era where people were very excited about the

possibility that the interface design would get some sort of, you know, overall. And I think DeWith

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,

a cabruing 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.

It's obvious that Sandowski has a lot of allegations in this lawsuit, you know, until this goes to trial.

If it does go to trial, you never know. It could get settled out of court, et cetera. But until

that point, you know, when DeWith has a chance to respond, we won't necessarily know the

his side of the story. But part of me does wonder if this could unfortunately tarnish that higher

because it ends up, you know, getting mired in this sort of, you know, mud slinging situation here.

So I was not aware of that when this, that 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 privilege 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. 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

duet's appointment with Apple at all. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm interested to. There's one

aspect of this that, you know, the lawsuit says that while duet was on paid leave,

that's when he began to communicate with Apple about a job instead of the acquisition.

The Apple contact person for his interviews had reportedly been involved in the earlier acquisition

talks. After the termination continued interviewing with Apple announced he joined Apple's design

team and the lawsuit says that even after joining Apple, duet still had the confidential materials

related to Luxus Future Product Development and that he, the lawsuit claims that he took the Apple

design award specifically the physical award that the company won in 2022. We may remember that

duet was the lead designer on the project or that at the company, like his thing was design,

I guess, is the best way to put it. Duet's attorney denied that any Lux intellectual property

was used, transferred it is closed 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 aquahire acquisition,

aquafire, aquafire of this, of Apple. You know, Apple's not named as a defendant,

doesn't accuse the company of wrongdoing, but interestingly, it does draw direct parallel to

the Massimo case where Apple discussed a partnership over blood oxygen sensing technology,

then hired away a bunch of Massimo employees who went on to work on Apple's own health tech,

and then Jerry did award Massimo money. Apple faces anti-trust scrutiny, obviously. The DOJ

Sue's Apple in 2024, and we've went on from there, I believe it was, yeah, Aiden Bazzetti,

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're talking about acquiring a company and then you hire

somebody, maybe that's what the way should look at. Or a lot of people, right? I mean, certainly.

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 Jan Andreu, who used to be in charge of the Apple AI

stuff came from Google, right? You know, in some ways because this the 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 a very small company,

right? With like only a couple people in it. 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, it feels awkward, right? Like, yeah, you know, and certainly that's the thing

that you have to consider, right? You always consider the source. And so it's, you look at something

like the Ben Sandowski suing him and saying, well, is he, is he just a mad that he didn't get bought

out 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. We don't know. 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 way it works. Yeah,

look at both sides of it. So until, again, until more information comes to light and, you know,

this is going to be potentially no fun for anybody because if they go to a trial and go through

discovery, a lot of a lot of stuff is going to come out probably and I don't think anybody's going

to look great necessarily. That's what Jason Snow was saying on Macbreak Weekly about this was,

you know, careful. I will say as a former news anchor, I appreciate the more open nature of

of Silicon Valley. 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

in competing news like you have to basically move your life in order to get another job

when you are a news anchor, somewhere else. It's a very difficult thing. The non-compete clauses

of it all. So moving out to different states have different rules of matter, which is also our

math thesis. I think that 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 everybody's got slightly different laws and it

is tricky to navigate all that. Absolutely. Well, Dan Morin, 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 6colors.com to check out your work, but where else should they go to do so? My pleasure 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 demoron.com. You can get links to all of my books, including my latest

is coming out this November, Eternity's Tomb. You can pre-order it there. But yeah, demoron.com.

It's all the details. It's everything you need. Beautiful. Thank you, Dan. Thanks, Micah.

Alrighty, folks. It's time to take a break before we come back with my interview this week. Well,

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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 is and 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. 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 appreciate that.

Yeah, absolutely. The FCC recently made a pretty big move when it comes to consumer routers.

Can you walk us through what exactly happened and then kind of give us an understanding of what

this ban entails? Yes, very specifically, very specifically. The FCC is keeping routers from being

imported, marketed, were 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 that future future devices are being banned in the United States.

So they can't come here, you can't market them, can't sell them, but the foreign routers is

an interesting way of phrasing it because that's basically all consumer routers. Basically,

anything that is made 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, NetGear in San Jose, Cisco, Silicon Valley, Linksys, all of these companies,

they don't make the routers here, they haven't for a long time, any more than Apple makes

since 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? All right, so based on that, if someone at 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

like it was made in the U.S., oh, I looked at the bottom, it says made in China. What do they need

to know? Are existing routers affected? Is someone going to come and take my router away from me?

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 away, 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 they're not mandating anything. 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've got to go patch your routers, there's no recall, there's nothing. 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, so future routers, the FCC has to authorize the radios of any new gadget

that comes into the United States to make sure there was any harmful interference, to make sure that

if you put a router out there, it's not going to interfere with the plane or a drone or an emergency

radio broadcast to signal 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. 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've found,

I mean, you've covered this a lot in what you've said so far, but what can you tell us about

which routers were targeted in the attacks regarding Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon and why maybe

that argument doesn't hold weight. 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 enterprise routers, all these consumer routers to get app 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 that count. Chinese hackers might have been involved in this,

but did they target Chinese routers, not necessarily NetGear and Cisco, these US 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

swords 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, and that's how they were

able to get in is our understanding situation. Wow. Okay. Now one thing seems to kind of

stand out here, and it's this approach, right, of sometimes you get these mandates from the

government, and they don't quite have a rollout 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 process? I feel like maybe you've read my explainer on the verge about

the US router van, because you're setting me up for this. You would think that if the US government

is concerned about the security of these routers, 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 these kinds of attacks. There are zero questions about cybersecurity in the list of

conditions for approval of these new routers, 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 US manufacturing and ensuring plan. What the US

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 one to five years.

There are as many questions about that as about anything else in the conditional approval.

If you want to get your routers into the United States companies, you need a detailed time-blown plan

to establish or expand your 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 US manufacturing, which isn't the worst

thing I suppose. Let's bring manufacturing back to the United States. Let's bring jobs back to

the United States. 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. I don't believe it.

Speaking 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? 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. 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, 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. DJI is the big one. It is the vast majority of this, and so it's very specifically targeting

DJI in that ban. The main difference is that the government had already targeted DJI.

With these routers, I don't think like this net gear, ASUS are going to have any

problem getting a pre-approved existing router through customs. But with DJI, US 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 and any

holistic way. It can get a few through here and there, but it can't set what's best drones in

the United States because customs is blocking them, not because of the foreign drone ban.

Got it. Now, lastly, I think this is sort of the big 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. 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? We need to know where

these companies designed to land. Are they going to lay your links, your net gear, your ASUS,

whether your router manufacturer is based in the United States or outside? Are they going to apply

for conditional approval and commit to US manufacturing? When they do that, if they do that,

are they 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 where I do think some companies will apply for this is that net gear and Cisco and

link system. A number of these have history in the United States. They were, they were started here.

They have those ties and they can't like say, oh, we'll just go serve China very easily because

they'd be losing their home country. Worth DJI can do that a little bit more easily. 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 on the rest of the world.

So I expect some companies will 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,

we'll put some millions into manufacturing here and that's good enough that the government

can chalk it up as a win, 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 are they going to

meaningfully do something here? Or maybe they some of them too? I don't know. Those are the

stories that I'm looking out for next. Well, Sean, I want to thank you so much for taking

the time to join us today to walking us through this ban 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? I am Sean Hollister at the

verge and I am Sean Hollister on Blue Sky. Awesome. 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.

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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's 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 three-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.

Kenneth 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. Artemis III 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.

If that test goes well, we could see two landing attempts in 2028 during Artemis IV and V.

After Artemis V, NASA wants to increase the cadence to two missions per year,

which would then shift to commercially procured, reusable hardware. Very exciting stuff.

Isaacman did frame the urgency and competitive term, 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 China,

which is 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 two 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 three phases. And Isaacman was up front that it's not going to happen quickly.

The moon base will not appear overnight, unfortunately. So first phase one, 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 a 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 two, which is early infrastructure where there will be semi habitable infrastructure,

supporting regular astronaut visits. International partners will come into play here,

including Jackson's pressurized rover. Then, excuse me, phase three, permanent presence,

or 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 utility vehicle, and other international

contributions. Now, for those first two phases, Isaacman said NASA will invest approximately $20

billion over the next seven years and build it through dozens of missions. Carlos Garcia Galan,

who is the program executive for the moon base, also said that phase three 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.

Garcia Galan had only been working on the moon base concept for about three and a half weeks

at the time that this announcement came fourth. The work on another project has been kind of

sort of shelved. When you want your spring break to feel like

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Venmo.ne slash stash terms. Max $100 cashback per month. 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

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 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-1 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 gateways,

solar panels, 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. 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. When SR-1 freedom reaches Mars,

it will deploy a payload of three ingenuity class helicopters equipped with cameras and radar

to search for frozen water at a possible future astronaut landing site.

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. I think that this is going to be

a great few years if all of this plays out for NASA, as we're seeing sort of a message and narrative

that another space race is on. And I think that, well, 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 add to

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