Six months after its launch, research firm Antenna estimates that the Howdy streaming service has more than 1 million subscribers.

Roku debuted Howdy in August. The subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service is $3 per month and doesn't have commercials.

In an announcement today, Antenna estimated that almost 300,000 people signed up for Howdy in August and that the service gained 100,000 subscribers in each subsequent month.

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In an order denying Sam Bankman-Fried's request for a new trial, a judge accused the disgraced FTX founder of wasting precious court resources on wild conspiracies. To the judge, the motion seemed like a last-ditch attempt to give himself a MAGA makeover that the Trump administration absolutely wasn't buying .

Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024 for "masterminding one of the largest financial frauds in American history," US District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in his order. He was convicted on all charges, including wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, commodities fraud, and money laundering.

There is already an appeal pending in another court, the judge noted. But Bankman-Fried filed a separate motion for a new trial, claiming that there were "newly discovered" witnesses and evidence that might have helped his defense, if Joe Biden's Department of Justice hadn't intimidated them into refusing to testify or, in one case, lying on the stand. He also asked for a new judge, wanting Kaplan to recuse himself.

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A data center developer has paused all Middle East project investments after one of its facilities was damaged by an Iranian missile or drone attack. The decision comes as the Iran war is forcing Silicon Valley investors and tech companies to rethink a trillion-dollar plan to build more AI and cloud data centers in Gulf countries.

The damaged data center is owned by Pure Data Centre Group, a London-based company that is operating or developing more than 1 gigawatt of data center capacity across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. “No one’s going to run into a burning building, so to speak,” Pure DC CEO Gary Wojtaszek told CNBC . “No one’s going to put in new additional capital at scale to do anything until everything settles down."

Data center developers are already eating the costs of uninsurable war damage from the conflict, which began with a US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28. Iran primarily responded by attacking shipping to shut down the Strait of Hormuz trade corridor along with striking US military bases and energy infrastructure across the Gulf region.

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Motorola is crazy about foldables. With each passing year, the company has beefed up its folding phone lineup, and in 2026, there will be four devices launching on May 21. At the top end is the company's first tablet-style foldable, the Razr Fold. Below that, Motorola will again offer three flip-style foldables: the Razr Ultra, Razr+, and Razr. These phones get a few modest upgrades over last year's phones , along with price increases. Motorola is unfortunately not immune to the rising cost of components.

The Razr Fold represents a big step for Moto. Its foldable flip phones have revived the Razr name and offered a good alternative to Samsung's Z Flip line, but people buying foldables are generally more interested in the large format. As prices at the lower end of the spectrum ratchet up, there's less and less distance between premium flip phones and bigger foldables. At $1,900, the Razr Fold is not a cheap phone, but it's roughly in line with the pricing of 2025 foldables (right between Google and Samsung). Given the current state of things, that's a small win for 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM.

Moto's first big foldable is almost here. Credit: Motorola

Motorola is not reinventing the wheel with the Fold, so you can expect a device that looks and feels similar to other big foldables like the Pixel 10 Pro Fold . It's about the same size as Google's foldable but slightly thinner and lighter. Samsung's Z Fold 7 , however, is much thinner and lighter. Motorola does have the advantage of stylus input, which Samsung has dropped from its foldables. The Moto Stylus will launch at $99 alongside the Razr Fold on May 21.

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Whether you're a gamer trying to play recent AAA titles at high resolutions and maxed-out settings or an AI enthusiast trying to run models locally, we've reached the point where a GPU with 8GB of video memory is a pretty limiting bottleneck. But because of ongoing memory shortages and price spikes, it's also a uniquely bad time for GPU makers to attempt to fix this problem— rumors suggested that a RAM-boosting mid-generation "Super" refresh for Nvidia's RTX 50-series GPUs was quietly delayed or canceled earlier this year, at least in part because of memory costs.

One of Nvidia's GPUs is getting a RAM upgrade, according to an announcement the company buried at the bottom of a blog post about a routine Game Ready driver update. The laptop version of the GeForce RTX 5070 is getting a bump from 8GB to 12GB of GDDR7, a 50 percent increase that should reduce some performance bottlenecks and generally future-proof the GPU.

Otherwise, the 12GB version of the mobile RTX 5070 is the same as the 8GB version. The RAM is still connected to the GPU with a 128-bit memory interface, and the GPU still has 4,608 CUDA cores. The mobile 5070 uses the same GB206 silicon die as the desktop RTX 5060 instead of the larger, more powerful GB205 die in the desktop version of the RTX 5070, meaning that despite the RAM increase, the desktop version remains a much more powerful GPU.

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Even before the Trump administration went to war against DEI and attempts to address historical discrimination, diversity efforts in the US were controversial. A pivotal moment came in 2023, when the Supreme Court ruled that race-based affirmative action programs violated the Constitution. The decision partly rested on universities' inability to clearly measure the benefits of diverse student bodies and the lack of defined standards to determine when equity had been achieved and such programs should end.

A new paper highlights the uncertainty. "Learning theory argues that racial diversity promotes student learning, which should increase salaries," its authors write. "However, well-documented racial wage discrimination indicates that higher racial diversity should decrease salaries."

But the authors—Debanjan Mitra, Peter Golder, and Mariya Topchy—have developed a metric suggesting that graduates benefit financially if they graduate with a diverse peer group. The researchers argue that this evidence should be sufficient to prompt courts to reconsider earlier rulings.

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A controversial bill in Colorado that would have undone some repair protections in the state has failed. The bill had been the target of right-to-repair advocates, who saw it as a bellwether for how tech companies might try to undo repair legislation more broadly in the US.

Colorado’s landmark 2024 repair law, the Consumer Right to Repair Digital Electronic Equipment , went into effect in January 2026 and ensured access to tools and documentation people needed to modify and fix digital electronics such as phones, computers, and Wi-Fi routers. The new bill, SB26-090 , would have carved out an exception to those repair protections for “critical infrastructure,” a loosely defined term that repair advocates worried could be applied to just about any technology.

SB26-090 was introduced during a Colorado Senate hearing on April 2 and was supported by lobbying efforts from companies such as Cisco and IBM. It passed that hearing unanimously. The bill then passed in the Colorado Senate on April 16. On Monday evening, the bill was discussed in a long, delayed hearing in the Colorado House’s State, Civic, Military, and Veterans Affairs Committee. Dozens of supporters and detractors gave public comments. Finally, the bill was shot down in a 7-to-4 vote and classified as postponed indefinitely.

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Astronomers say the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket that launched in early 2025 will strike the Moon later this summer, likely on the near side of the Moon.

Bill Gray, who writes the widely used Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects, has published a comprehensive report on the impact expected to occur at 2:44 am ET (06:44 UTC) on August 5. The Falcon 9 rocket's upper stage is 13.8 meters (45 feet) tall and has a 3.7-meter (12 feet) diameter. Since the Moon has no atmosphere, it will strike the lunar surface intact.

Although the Moon will be visible to the eastern half of the US and Canada, and in much of South America, Gray said he believes the impact will probably be too faint to be seen by Earth-based telescopes.

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OpenAI could have prevented one of the deadliest mass shootings in Canada's history, a string of seven lawsuits filed Wednesday in a California court alleged.

Ultimately, the AI company overruled recommendations from its internal safety team. More than eight months prior to the school shooting, trained experts had flagged a ChatGPT account later linked to the shooter as posing a credible threat of gun violence in the real world. In those cases, OpenAI is expected to notify police—which, in this case, already had a file on the shooter and had proactively removed guns from their home previously—but that's not what happened.

Apparently, OpenAI decided that the user's privacy and the potential stress of an encounter with cops outweighed the risks of violence, whistleblowers told The Wall Street Journa l. Leaders rejected the safety team's urgings and declined to report the user to law enforcement. Instead, OpenAI simply deactivated the account, then quickly followed up to tell the shooter how to get back on ChatGPT to continue planning by signing up with another email address, the lawsuits alleged.

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