The Trump administration today exempted SpaceX's Starlink routers from the Federal Communications Commission ban on foreign-made routers.

A public notice issued by the FCC said Starlink routers received approval from the Department of War (also known as the Department of Defense). SpaceX's exemption is good until February 1, 2028.

The FCC kicked off an industry-wide scramble when it updated the Covered List to include all consumer-grade routers made at least partly outside the US, except those that are granted exemptions. The Covered List includes devices deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to national security. Given that routers are generally built outside the US or at least contain foreign-made components, all major vendors need exemptions.

Netgear, Amazon, and other companies have previously been given exemptions. It's widely expected that companies with Chinese ties will have the most trouble obtaining exemptions from the Trump administration, which alleges that foreign networking products pose national security risks and has pushed companies to make more devices in the US.

SpaceX routers made in Vietnam

SpaceX has a factory in Texas, and some of its routers have the words “Made in the USA" printed on them, leading some to believe that it might be the only major router maker to escape the FCC's wide-ranging ban. But other Starlink routers are made in Vietnam, as PCMag reported in April.

The FCC ban does not affect any routers that the FCC approved for sale before the rule change, but companies need the exemptions to get approval for future router models. Under the process announced by the FCC in March, router makers can ask the Department of War or Department of Homeland Security for a determination that their devices do not pose unacceptable risks to national security.

Netgear was the first major vendor to get an exemption, on April 14. Amazon then received an exemption for its Eero routers and the routers to be used for its Leo satellite service. TP-Link, which was founded in China but relocated its headquarters to the US, has not yet received an exemption. The full list of exemptions, formally known as "conditional approvals," is available on the FCC website.

Drone makers also need exemptions under the same process because the FCC added drones to the Covered List last year. Chinese drone company DJI sued the FCC over the ban, and router makers could do the same if they are similarly unable to gain exemptions.

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Over the past decade or so, all sorts of automakers have produced all sorts of answers to the question of “What happens when sedan sales keep trending downward?” From the compact crossover wars to Toyota replacing the Avalon with the crossover sedan Crown to the seemingly eternal shelf life of the current Nissan Altima, there’s no silver bullet. Perhaps that’s why, according to Automotive News, Honda is reportedly working on a hybrid Accord crossover to rival the Subaru Outback.

The midsize model, called the “Accord SUV” in a Honda planning document, is expected to enter production in mid-2029, potentially in Marysville, Ohio, a person with knowledge of the plan told Automotive News.

The strange part is, this isn’t the first time Honda’s tried turning an Accord into a crossover. However, given how that one went, it’s a strange facet of recent history to mine for sales ambitions.

Back around the turn of the 2010s, Honda launched two midsize swoopy-roofed crossovers that shared virtually nothing in common. One was the Acura ZDX, which may have been the result of an elephant sitting on the back of an MDX. Same platform, same powertrain, you know the drill. The other was the Accord Crosstour and it was much, much weirder. For one, it looked like this.

Now that we’re in an age of the BMW XM, the Accord Crosstour isn’t that ugly, but it was downright shocking more than 15 years ago. Sure, there’s a whiff of Accord in here if you squint, but the bulbous silhouette, then-enormous grille and strange details like the surfacing around the fog lamps and black liftgate applique rendered the Crosstour visually divisive.

In some ways, the controversial styling was a shame because it hid the Crosstour’s general usefulness. Underneath that huge hatch sat a commodious cargo area and a cavernous hidden cubby under a false floor for keeping valuables out of sight. Rear legroom matched that of the Accord midsize sedan, but available all-wheel-drive gave the Crosstour the edge in slippery conditions. With a choice of four-cylinder or V6 engines, the foundation seemed solid, but Honda didn’t get the build-up right out of the gate.

In addition to the styling, it probably didn’t help that if you needed a Honda with a ton of space in 2010, you could get into a base-model Pilot for thousands of dollars less than the cheapest Crosstour. That’s not quite an apples-to-apples comparison, as the cheapest Pilot was a fairly basic LX trim while the cheapest Crosstour was a more well-equipped EX trim, but a third row and an extra 35.7 cu.-ft. of maximum cargo volume are hard to argue with if room and cost mattered more than features.

As such, sales never really took off despite a 2013 facelift to make the Crosstour look more normal. From the start of production in 2009 through the final year of production in 2015, Honda sold 107,990 Accord Crosstours in America. It took another two years to sell 731 leftover examples, resulting in total sales of 108,721. For context, Honda sold 311,381 Accords in 2010. Ah.

Mind you, the market has changed considerably over the past eleven years. The sedanocalypse took a big bite out of both sedan offerings and sales figures, fastback SUVs have only been gaining popularity, and the squared-off two-row Passport means a new Accord-based crossover could operate in a different price bracket than the Crosstour. It’s a different path than, say, bringing the Prelude back. That’s Honda’s 11th-generation Thunderbird, a date-night car for empty nesters.

If Honda really wants to compete with the Subaru Outback, it would need something hugely practical with an aggressive starting price. A hybrid powertrain sounds unique, but it only feels like a matter of time before Subaru stuffs its e-Boxer hybrid system in the Outback to level the playing field. Of course, this purported Honda could still just not happen, given how 2029 is three years away, and much can change in three years. We’ll just have to wait and see how this plays out.

Top graphic image: Honda

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When the Steam Machine was first announced, a non-zero number of people zeroed in on a single accessory in the video. The Steam Machine takes swappable faceplates, allowing for customization, and the team at Valve had internally created an ePaper display that showed off the various internal statistics of the device: fan speed, temperature, memory and CPU performance. 

When people asked “will you be selling that?” Valve quickly said no and that it was primarily a tool for internal testing. But a few weeks back, in the most Valve move possible, they released the full files for the device, called the “Inkterface.” If you want to recreate an ePaper display on the front of your Steam Machine, you can buy the parts yourself, solder them together, 3D print a case, download the files from Gitlab, build the firmware, flash the device, and do it yourself. So I did.

The Inkterface’s beginnings

The Inkterface started as a functional tool to test the Steam Machine’s performance across multiple units quickly and easily. “We’re a small team so we try to do a lot of automated testing and monitoring. Having some kind of screen-less feedback on the Machine was always something we wanted,” NaKyle Wright, who worked on the Inkterface for Valve, told me. “I made iterations with small LCD screens, mini-displays, and other mechanisms, but really I was never quite happy with the way they looked and fit on the Machine.”

“When I found the 5.83” EPD fit so perfectly in the faceplate footprint I quickly put together a prototype that was barely held together with tape and hot glue. That’s the unit folks saw in the first press event,” he told me “The same aesthetic choices drove me to give it a battery, even if it is annoying to charge, but at that first iteration I also had it automatically switching connections based on signal strength so I could swap it between units on desks, lab benches, etc. and just automatically get stats. I turned that off later, as it’s a little impractical with the use case of just a single unit or several units close together on a test rack.”

The Inkterface itself is not hard-wired into the Steam Machine, although people have already engineered solutions to make it work that way. It instead is a battery-powered face plate with sandwiched magnets that snaps to the front and communicates via Bluetooth. The upshot is that you don’t actually need the device to be attached to your Machine to use it. It needs to be charged occasionally, and works by installing a light service on your Machine in Linux that runs in the background. 

Eventually this program will just be downloadable for free from Steam, but for now both the AppImage and the firmware must be downloaded and built locally from the Inkterface repository. By default the Inkterface shows the basic values that you would expect: OS/Bios/Steam versions, CPU/GPU temperature, fan speeds, overall load and memory consumption, but each of these values can be customized to report different values like the number of apps installed or total machine uptime.

“Once I saw how folks were interested in it with even just the 15 seconds or so of footage it got, we decided to open source it,” Wright said. From there he told me that his priorities shifted from building out every potential feature and instead making it approachable to the broadest number of people possible. 

“I locked the design down to a single board, EDP breakout, battery, fastener size, and magnets that were readily available. I tried to simplify the wiring and soldering, making the backplate an easy way to hold the boards in place while you make the connections, and the connections mostly just along one side. I ruled out using any highly customized or niche libraries for the firmware. I kept the data collection and control software standalone and included so folks wouldn’t need to join up into any unknown ecosystem. I spent a lot of time trying to make the PDF and video guides concise and clear. All with the hope it would be approachable enough that folks who might have never soldered anything would take a shot at it. Not sure if I really achieved that or not!”

With the exception of some minor hiccups, I believe that he did.

Getting started

The bill of materials for the Inkterface is not complex. Building it requires magnets in a specific form factor, some wires, a handful of parts you can print yourself, some m2.5 screws, an LP803860 battery, an Adafruit ESP32-S3 Feather, an ePaper “breakout friend” board and a 5.83 inch display from Adafruit. The case is meant to be 3D printed, and .stl files are provided. Unfortunately, ePaper is still a little pricey, and so the entire bill of materials as built is about 100 bucks plus shipping, because you are functionally cobbling together a weird Kindle that snaps to your computer. I could see saving some money down the line by using parts from Waveshare or Aliexpress, but I didn’t want to complicate things further, and Adafruit’s strength is that they are both reliable and consistent. Wright included not only very detailed instructions, but also a full build video that can be followed step-by-step.

Sometimes a project does not cooperate with you, and in this case one small but understandable error complicated the build. The Inkterface relies on an ESP32, a ubiquitous chip that’s in a huge number of smart devices. Similar to the Inkterface, the Xteink X4 is mostly just an ePaper screen with an ESP32 and a battery. The specific microcontroller main-board that the Inkterface uses is called a Feather, and the initial instructions for the Inkterface used an Adafruit Feather V1, but linked to an Adafruit Feather V2.  

This complicates things because those two boards, though nearly identical in many ways, have different pinouts and handle checking battery levels differently. Due to how the project was hosted initially, flagging this problem was slightly difficult. One person I talked to on Reddit ran into the same issue and found a workaround. Eventually, I was able to get in contact with Wright and he quickly pushed a few updates to fix the issues I encountered. All of this is normal in the context of DIY and open source projects, as equipment you use to tinker behaves differently when it’s out in the wild being built by strangers. That’s all fixed now, but just know that I had to solder, desolder, and resolder this entire thing about four times across multiple Feathers so that people who come after won’t. With the now updated instructions, it is a fairly simple and straightforward build if you have the parts and know how to solder.

Flashing the firmware is on the technical end, but if you own a Steam Machine and are at all interested in making this, you signed up for some Linux shit. You have to download the firmware using Git. Git is a command line tool that is used to manage software, and in this case you use “git clone” to download the entire repository locally on your computer. From there it’s mostly copy-pasting commands into the terminal, but technically what you’re doing is using Distrobox, which is a tool in Linux that lets you use other, specific, containerized versions of Linux to build the firmware and app. Eventually the app itself will be downloadable from the Steam store so you don’t need to build that part of it. 

Depending on what version of Linux you’re flashing this from, you may need to make sure that you’re able to use serial control by adding yourself to the dial out group. But once you do, flashing the firmware is a matter of navigating to the firmware folder and typing in a single command while the assembled device is plugged in. The rest is all done for you. The repo also contains an SVG file of Gabe Newell’s face, and if you enable that as a build flag I believe it appears as a splash screen, although it appears to be disabled by default for image retention reasons on the display.

Once that’s done, you simply run the app that the computer built, install the service using the UI, and connect to the specific panel. Because Inkterface runs off of a lithium ion battery, you need to make sure it’s charged every once in a blue moon. Once installed, the completed faceplate works seamlessly. The one negative part about it is that, because it is an ePaper display, it has to refresh occasionally to update the information. By default it uses a full refresh, which is a little distracting if you’re using it in a living room context, but building the firmware so that it does a partial refresh is also possible and people have already done that online. But even with that drawback, it does look handsome, and is an object that could only exist with the context of the Steam Machine specifically and open source development generally.

Raw clay

The Inkterface is a niche device developed for internally testing a specific piece of hardware. Even people who have a Steam Machine might not find it useful, as the device's appeal is that it minds its own business and just works. Though you could tweak its default values, you probably don’t need to be constantly updated about how fast the system’s fan is going unless you’re doing something really perverted with the Steam Machine. But the strength of the Inkterface is the strength of the device itself: openness. You technically do not need a Steam Machine to make an Inkterface, and the device itself might be ideal for non-Steam Machine builds where overclocking is common and there’s a lot more variables to track. I have seen at least one slick DIY 3D printed neon build that integrates it directly into the chassis. 

Created by Reddit user nicnic-cc, the case dubbed the “Beaminnie” is a 5.5L sandwich case. Printed out of PETG and offered in versions with and without an ePaper display, it features cutouts for GPU and CPU fans, and it directly embeds the display in the front for better monitoring of thermals. Nicnic-cc also modified the firmware, removing the battery logic to better run the device wired and changing the logo to reflect the machine is running Bazzite, a different open source Linux distro similar to the SteamOS that the Steam Machine runs on. As with BC250 builds, the Beaminnie is cyberpunk in a sense that I wish was more common: unique, tailored, bold, and uncommercial, like the single shot in Hackers where you briefly see them spray their laptops camouflage. It is a stunning build, clean and eye-catching, the kind of object you can only make and representative of the electric excitement that people have for an open computing future.

The future

More than anything, I wonder what the community will do with the raw material that Valve has provided. An app that integrates with Steam and displays the art of the game you’re playing on the front of the device would be great. 

The Inkterface is also not dissimilar to the work being done by the company TRMNL, a startup that has leaned into Kindle hacking and DIY to create an ecosystem for ePaper calendar reminders. When I reached out to TRMNL, they replied that they had already publicly committed to porting their software to work on the Inkterface. While they do not have anything currently, TRMNL’s founder confirmed to me that they would be working to make their software work on the device soon. In addition to this, company JSAUX has already announced that they have two ePaper Steam Machine face plates in the works, although what that looks like in practice is another story.

“There were so many ideas and suggestions, but so little time!” Wright said. “I know some folks have added partial refresh, enabling sleep on the ESP32 would be nice, and of course a lot more stats could be collected and displayed. Daily news, weather, notifications–all would be cool! More than anything I’m excited to see how much better the community will make it and the interesting things they might build with the pieces!”

ePaper as a technology is entering into a beautiful space. While the displays themselves are still a little pricey, microcontrollers like the ESP32 have gotten cheap and are powerful enough to drive them to do serious tasks. Open source development like the work done on the Crosspoint’s firmware and Kindle hacking are creating new possibilities. What’s more, inexpensive ePaper displays like the Xteink are increasing the flexibility of these devices. Amazon does not own this space anymore, and it was an inevitability that they would not. 

What Valve has done with the Inkterface rhymes with what was already happening organically in the DIY space. To the extent that a video game console can be ideological, the Inkterface perfectly represents what the Steam Machine is: open and overflowing with raw potential that extends beyond the device itself. It is not a product, but rather raw clay to be shaped. People can build, modify, and create their own Inkterface, with or without a Steam Machine. They can modify the firmware, change the form factor, or even have it run on different hardware altogether. People can embed an Inkterface in a custom PC case, run it hardwired, and change the logo to reflect that it’s running Bazzite. The Inkterface is niche for now, a 3D printed product for a specific device, but like many open source projects, it’s impossible to predict what people will build with what they have been given.

“Hopefully,” Wright said, “it’s all small and simple enough that if someone is interested they can break it down and understand any individual part, realize they could make something way cooler, and go for it!”

After criticism from a federal judge, the Department of Justice yesterday withdrew demands for phone records and grand jury testimony from New York Times reporters who wrote about security concerns related to the Air Force One jet donated to Trump by Qatar.

It was a setback in the Trump administration's attempts to unmask journalists' confidential sources. US District Judge Arun Subramanian "grilled Justice Department lawyers for nearly an hour over their handling of the subpoenas" during a hearing on Thursday, The New York Times wrote.

“Either we can quash the subpoenas, or you could withdraw the subpoenas,” Subramanian reportedly told Sean Buckley, chief counsel for the US attorney in New York's southern district.

Subramanian reportedly said during the hearing that subpoenas to reporters “are not the first thing you do—they are the last thing you do," and that “it’s a matter of basic compliance with the law." Government lawyers agreed to withdraw the subpoenas during the hearing.

"As stated on the record during the July 23, 2026, hearing, the Government has voluntarily withdrawn the challenged subpoenas, including the subpoenas issued to the journalists as well as the third-party subpoenas. Those subpoenas are null and void. As a result, the motions to quash are moot," Subramanian wrote in an order yesterday.

NYT: "Brazen effort to intimidate the press"

The NYT reported on Monday that the US government sought phone and text messaging records of NYT journalists and their relatives, including one reporter's mother and two reporters' spouses. This was in addition to subpoenas demanding that reporters testify before a federal grand jury.

On July 15, the NYT filed a motion to quash the subpoenas seeking grand jury testimony. The motion called the demands "a brazen effort to intimidate the press into abandoning its critical, constitutionally protected role." The motion said armed federal agents served the subpoenas at the journalists' homes, ordering them to appear before a grand jury within three business days.

"The Federal Bureau of Investigation Director [Kash Patel] orchestrated this activity from within the White House, in close coordination with top Administration officials and in response to the President’s anger over the reporting," the motion said.

Two days after this motion was filed, the government revealed in a call with NYT counsel that it also served subpoenas on phone providers for call records, according to a July 18 filing. In the newer filing, the NYT asked the court "to quash the newly-disclosed grand jury subpoenas served on third-party phone service providers on July 10, July 14, and July 16, 2026, for records associated with the Journalists."

Trump admin lashes out at judge

During Subramanian's questioning of DOJ lawyers, "the government acknowledged factual errors in its filings. It conceded that it had omitted significant information—including that the case pertained to journalists’ records—when it asked a different federal judge to prevent a phone company from disclosing a record request," the NYT reported.

Buckley had "argued that the nature of The Times’s reporting on sensitive national security matters had allowed for an exception to standard procedures," but "he struggled to identify the precise legal rationale for that exception when the judge pressed him," the NYT article said.

Buckley apparently admitted that the subpoenas shouldn't have sought phone records of reporters' relatives. "Mr. Buckley also acknowledged that the phone record subpoenas had inadvertently encompassed relatives of the Times reporters—including the mother of one and the spouses of two others—calling it an error and 'a consequence of trying to move quickly,'" the NYT wrote.

The Trump administration lashed out at the judge after the hearing. “This judge threatened our attorneys with sanctions unless subpoenas were withdrawn, and blocked us from presenting the meticulous process of this investigation," a DOJ spokesperson said in a statement provided to Ars today.

"The grand jury has a right to hear testimony from all material witnesses in a federal criminal investigation," the DOJ statement continued. "This judge’s conduct overrides clear longstanding principles and common sense—blocking the grand jury from receiving core evidence in a national security investigation. Make no mistake, this investigation remains ongoing, and we will pursue justice against those threatening national security by leaking classified information, a serious federal crime.”

US previously seized Washington Post reporter's devices

NYT newsroom lawyer David McCraw issued a statement calling the hearing "an important affirmation of our country’s commitment to a free press. We are pleased that the government finally conceded that the subpoenas violated the law, but they should never have been issued in the first place.”

The NYT motion to quash said that after Trump accepted the Boeing jet from Qatar, "concerns were immediately raised about the ethical implications of accepting a $400 million gift from a foreign government, the costs to American taxpayers of retrofitting a commercial jet to serve as a 'flying White House'—with all the necessary communications, security, and support capabilities—and the national security implications of using a foreign-donated aircraft for that purpose."

The NYT motion said the paper's reporting on the topic "was manifestly in the public interest. It contributed to the public’s knowledge about the workings of the Executive Branch, the President’s dealings with foreign nations, and the safety of an aircraft that transports the President and many other public officials, reporters, and guests."

In January, the FBI seized devices from a Washington Post reporter who had built up a contact list of 1,100 current and former government employees. The government said it was unable to access data from the iPhone because it was protected by Apple’s Lockdown Mode, but it did access the reporter's work MacBook Pro by compelling her to unlock it with her fingerprint.

A judge ordered a halt to the FBI search of the Post reporter's devices, and decided the court would do the search itself because the government only had probable cause to obtain a small fraction of the material it seized.

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There’s just something about a Volvo wagon that feels right. They usually aren’t the fastest or most opulent or most efficient or most gadget-rich cars on the road, but they usually have a certain mix of style, practicality, and comfort that’s hard to resist. The modern V90 is still an absolutely stunning machine with huge presence and a gorgeous interior, which explains its fairly strong resale value. Want an R-Design model in Bursting Blue? Be prepared to pay. Fortunately, I recently learned that there is a way of getting a largely similar car for much less cash: Buy one with cladding.

Nearly three decades ago, Volvo looked at what Subaru was doing with the Outback and thought “I’ll have what they’re having.” The result was the V70 XC, the latter two letters standing for “Cross Country.” This raised-up plastic-clad wagon was an instant hit, so it’s no surprise that the Cross Country lineage has continued through to models like the V90 Cross Country. It’s been raised by 2.3 inches over the standard V90, fitted with chunky fender flares, skirts and valences to shrug off stone chips and brambles, but is otherwise the same car as its low-slung brother.

This means you get those razor-sharp Thor’s Hammer headlights, an optional Bowers & Wilkins sound system that remains the benchmark for OEM premium audio setups, 53.9 cu.-ft. of cargo space with the rear seats folded down, and front seats that can fix your life, never mind your posture. Admittedly, I’m still not crazy about the screen-heavy tablet-style infotainment system, but at least it supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto so you can plug your phone in and forget about much of the native interface. Beyond that, every switch is nicely damped, and every material from the open-pore wood to the silky leather feels quality, which makes a second-hand V90 Cross Country seem like a lot of car for less than $20,000.

Oh yes, while that sort of pricing does only get you an early model, you aren’t exclusively looking at examples with moon mileage. Check out this brown-over-blonde 2017 V90 Cross Country T6 up for sale in Massachusetts with all the toys you could really want. The phenomenal Bowers & Wilkins sound system, massaging seats, rear side window blinds, enhanced parking assistance, and the 316-horsepower twin-charged engine. All this for $18,500 with a clean history report. Even the mileage isn’t crazy for a near-decade-old car, with 121,373 miles on the clock working out to roughly the standard of 13,000 a year. Nice.

If mileage is more of a concern than cleanly blasting “Weird Fishes” so loudly that the neighbors get concerned, something like this 2018 V90 Cross Country T5 is probably more in your wheelhouse. It skips the supercharger to produce 250 horsepower from a two-liter turbocharged inline-four, has 92,674 miles on the clock, and is up for sale in Nashville, Tenn. for $17,896. Again, a lot of car for the money.

If you don’t care much about mileage and just want to ball on a budget, this particular 2017 V90 Cross Country T6 is diabolically cheap. To be specific, $10,699, and it even has the Bowers & Wilkins sound system specced. Why so cheap? Well, it’s a one-two punch of damage history and a whopping 193,792 miles on the clock. Still, if you’re feeling brave, make your way down to East Windsor, Connecticut, where this raised wagon is up for sale.

By now you’re probably wondering what the catch is here. After all, heavily depreciated European luxury cars are often diabolically expensive to run. Right you are, as these early V90 Cross Country examples sometimes suffered teething issues. That T6 twincharged engine doesn’t have the most robust supercharger on the planet, for example. A complete replacement kit with a new supercharger, gaskets, and an alignment tool currently costs $1,684.06 plus a $250 core charge from FCP Euro. Rarer but still known enough to be noteworthy is the air-con evaporator core. Some owners have reported it failing, and this is a properly expensive job as the whole dashboard needs to come out. The part itself is only $700, but the sheer time required to replace it can push labor costs into the thousands. On a more minor note, there’s a $68 coolant line that can go brittle with time, a $102 updated sunroof seal can stop annoying air leaks, and while the LED taillights are known for water ingress, aftermarket replacements are available at significantly lower cost.

Okay, so the Volvo V90 Cross Country isn’t the most reliable second-hand luxury car you can buy, but when it comes to large, luxurious wagons, it’s still rather tempting. Well-judged ride quality meets plenty of passenger space, a usable cargo hold, and sumptuous design inside and out. It’s relaxing to drive, exceptionally comfortable, and just a lovely object to live with every day. So long as you’re willing to take the brave pill and have a few grand set aside in case the air conditioning evaporator leaks, this is still a ton of car for the money. Didn’t know they were getting this cheap? Now you do.

Top graphic image: Autotrader seller

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