European rocket reaches orbit as crypto hack steals millions

Space flight and a major hack

A German rocket company called Isar Aerospace put its Spectrum vehicle into orbit from Munich on its second test flight. That makes it the first European commercial launcher to reach orbit, a quiet but real milestone for a region that has leaned on government programs for decades.

At the same time, a Bitcoin sidechain called Liquid Network disclosed that attackers drained about 4,000 coins from its federation wallet. The haul is worth roughly three hundred twenty million dollars. Two separate outlets reported the breach, one placing it in London and another in Tokyo, but the figures match exactly.

AI tools and rules

Google DeepMind opened its Lyria 3.5 music model to everyone using the Gemini app and API. The release happened in London and puts a capable generative audio tool in the hands of regular users, not just researchers.

China's top court issued guidelines that cover unauthorized deepfakes, voice cloning, and other AI disputes. The rules come from Beijing and signal that courts there are preparing for a wave of litigation around synthetic media.

Separately, researchers at Sejong University in South Korea published a survey that catalogs hidden annotation errors in popular object detection datasets. The work matters because those datasets train the vision systems used in cars, phones, and security cameras.

Product changes and research

Tesla has stopped selling its Solar Roof glass tiles in Austin, pulling the product from its site and order forms. The company said the line was not economically viable, ending a product that once promised to blend solar power into the roof itself.

Sony began rolling out Android 17 to its 2024 flagship Xperia 1 VIII in Tokyo. The update package is about one point two gigabytes.

The RPCS3 emulator team in Hamburg released a version that can run PlayStation 3 games straight from physical Blu-ray discs on Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD. In Beijing, a battery research team showed a way to suppress gas buildup in lithium manganese-rich cells, keeping ninety-two point two percent of energy after eight hundred eighty-three cycles.