A Wall Street Journal report said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk ordered the Starlink throttling that blindsided Ukraine's air assault forces last week, despite Musk's claim that all decisions on the military version of Starlink are made by the US military and President Trump.

Trump denied ordering the restrictions. While Musk may have spoken to Trump and administration officials before the decision, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Musk made the final call. The decision came after both Musk and Trump criticized Ukraine for attacking Russian diesel refineries.

"Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration," the WSJ wrote, citing unnamed US officials and people familiar with the matter. The report said that "Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network... rendering some offensive drones and interceptor drones virtually useless."

Ukraine officials say the restriction affected Starshield, a satellite offering for the military that uses Starlink technology. In this case, "speed" refers to the flight speed of drones.

"The cap, imposed without warning early Thursday, cuts the Internet data connection when a communication terminal moves faster than 160 kph (100 mph), which is common for Ukrainian drones equipped with Starshield, the military version of the Starlink satellite service offered by SpaceX. The restriction forced the drones to fly slower than usual, making it easier for Russian weapons to target or evade them," the Associated Press wrote last week.

Musk and Trump both denied responsibility

The Starlink and Starshield names are often used interchangeably by government officials discussing military use, and Ukraine has been known to use both the Starlink commercial service and the Starshield military variant. But Ukrainian officials have made it clear they are objecting to new restrictions on Starshield.

One WSJ source said Musk spoke to Trump and White House officials before the decision.

"Some US officials say that Musk acted unilaterally and that Trump didn’t specifically order any retribution against Ukraine. But a person familiar with the situation said Musk talked to multiple senior administration officials, including with Trump, before imposing the new speed cap, which Ukrainian officials said had allowed Russian missiles to evade their defenses," the WSJ wrote.

CBS News yesterday said its sources indicated that "Musk held multiple conversations with administration officials leading up to the order" and "wanted clarity on the president's thinking on the matter."

Musk denied making the decision to limit Starshield last week. He wrote on October 14 that, unlike the Starlink commercial service, “Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS."

Trump told reporters on October 16, "I didn't do that. No, we didn't do that at all... I heard about it through the news, through the media. We didn't slow it down at all." Trump was asked again on Monday who ordered the slowdown and responded, "I don't know who it was, but I'd like to find out."

Confusion, conflicting reports

A Reuters report on October 15 stated that the "order to limit a satellite system used by Ukraine for battlefield communications and drone operations came from inside the White House, according to two US officials and a Western official briefed on the matter."

Yesterday's WSJ report suggests that after Ukraine complained, officials from SpaceX and the White House coordinated on messaging in an attempt to minimize the backlash. "During the uproar, SpaceX representatives called White House counterparts seeking a unified understanding and subsequent message that the company and Trump administration coordinated ahead of Musk’s directive, the people said," according to the WSJ.

Musk's October 14 post said that any "offensive military action" must rely on Starshield and not the Starlink commercial service. Musk has previously objected to certain US military uses of the Starlink commercial service.

Starlink's dominance of the market for low-Earth orbit satellite broadband, and the technology's usefulness for military operations, has given Musk a unique ability to influence the war in Ukraine. Musk first sent Starlink terminals to Ukraine in February 2022 after the Russian invasion disrupted broadband access.

SpaceX confirmed in 2023 that it had blocked Ukraine from using Starlink with military drones, saying its contract with Ukraine did not allow offensive uses. But in August 2024, SpaceX received a Pentagon contract to expand Ukraine's access to the military-focused Starshield, Bloomberg reported later that year.

The August 2024 deal was apparently the second such contract, and it reportedly allowed Ukraine to connect another 2,500 Starlink terminals to the Starshield network. Ukraine already had 500 terminals connected to Starshield under a previous contract, the Bloomberg report said.

Zelenskyy: Starlink/Starshield still needs to be restored

Despite those previously reported contracts, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Saturday that Ukraine uses only Starlink and not Starshield. "I know Ukraine wants access to Starshield. They do not have Starshield now. They've asked for access to it in order to conduct deep strikes inside of Russia," Rubio said.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine uses Starshield and that the new restrictions have not been completely lifted. He wrote in an X post on Monday that the limits affect "units using Starlink/Starshield services. Unfortunately, we have established that the equipment stops functioning at speeds of 130–161 kilometers per hour in various sectors of the front."

Zelenskyy's office said in a press release yesterday that Zelenskyy spoke with Rubio on the phone to discuss several topics, including "the situation with Starlink/Starshield, which needs to be restored."

Rubio told reporters today that "the president has nothing to do with the decisions that are made by Starlink and Starshield and by Mr. Musk. That’s a private company. The president doesn’t run that company and can’t direct that company to do anything." Rubio said the administration had "no foreknowledge" of the slowdown.

When contacted by Ars today, the White House press office reiterated Trump's statement but provided no further details. “As President Trump said, we didn’t slow down Starlink at all, and the service is currently operational," the White House said.

We contacted SpaceX and will update this article if it responds.

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There’s been a lot of discourse lately about how the undersides of Hot Wheels toy cars have become more simplified over time; as someone with a longstanding and deep-seated interest in the undersides of toy cars, this post got me thinking about toy cars, and checking my stashes of toy cars to scrutinize their bottoms, a phrase that, taken out of context, will likely not look good for me.

As I was looking up older and older toy cars, I soon found myself sliding down a well-greased rabbit hole and found myself at the absolute bottom: the oldest toy car ever found.

Really, it’s not just the oldest toy car ever found, it seems to be the oldest toy of any kind ever found! And it sure as hell seems like a car, even though, you know, it was made thousands and thousands of years before there was anything even remotely like an automobile. Still, look at it:

 

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The “car” is a fired-clay artifact from what is known as the Chalcolithic period, which is also sometimes known as the Copper Age, as this is the era when the first usage of copper had been found. Really, this era is the first time that any metallurgy had been used, as this age was directly preceded by the Neolithic Era, or “new stone age.”

This toy is old. It’s estimated to have been built sometime between 5500 and 3000 BCE, and while that is a huge possible range, it means that it could be between 7,500 and 5,000 years ago, meaning at the newest it would roughly be from the period of the first Egyptian dynasty.

The toy was recovered at Kızıltepe in Türkiye, which would have been part of ancient Mesopotamia. The toy very likely represents some manner of animal-pulled cart of the era, but what really strikes me is just how much it looks like a show rod or dragster from the 1960s, especially in the way the wheels are staggered. Again, look at it:

It feels like some kind of T-body rat rod, with the narrow-set front wheels, the wider track/wider wheel rear, and what looks like a sort of cab behind a longer hood.

The illusion holds from the side, too; it feels like a car with a long hood, big wheels, and a short-ish cab. If I were to try and make it look even more like a car, I think I’d do something like this:

That’d be a pretty fun show rod, right? I mean, for something based on a 6,000-year-old styling inspiration, I think it works.

Of course, that’s nothing like whatever this was originally supposed to represent. I think those raised sides were likely to represent the walls of a wagon-like cart, and perhaps the “cab” was actually some sort of bench for a driver, holding the reins of an ox or aurochs or some other sort of animal? In my re-imagining of it as an automobile, I suspect I have the orientation backwards.

Were those axles original? I’m amazed at how well this seems to have been preserved, being found in some mound out there, not even in a tomb, like some other ancient wheeled toys and objects have been found. In fact, there have been a number of extremely old wheeled toys found, across cultures, even in cultures like Mesoamerican ones where wheels were not used at larger scale, mostly because of uncooperative terrain and a lack of suitable beasts of burden to pull wheeled vehicles.

Wheels and toys just go together. My kid’s first word was “wheel,” even. Wheels are just fun. For something that has proven so crucial to the technological growth of our species, I feel like this is an important thing to remember.

Top graphic images: Bizsiziz.com; DepositPhotos.com

The post The Oldest Toy Ever Found Is This ~6,000 Year Old Toy Car appeared first on The Autopian.

Do I have to come right flat out and tell you everything?

A list obtained by The Washington Post reveals all the major donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project, including previously undisclosed contributors who have benefited from regulatory decisions, government contracts and, in one case, a pardon for a family member.

Tech giants Nvidia and Apple each committed $25 million, the top contribution amount, the list shows. The Adelson family, one of the GOP’s largest donor dynasties, committed that sum as well, as did billionaire Charles Ergen, co-founder and chairman of telecommunications company Dish Network.

Absent from the list is Trump himself, who has said that he is helping to pay for the project. “It’s being paid for a hundred percent by me and some friends of mine,” he said last year, days after demolition began on the old East Wing.

The White House publicly identified 37 people, companies and foundations as donors last October, without revealing the amount of their individual gifts.

The list obtained by The Post, an internal spreadsheet used to track contributions for the fundraising effort, contains the source, date and amount of all 67 donations above $10,000 recorded as of late last month. It shows a total of $333 million from private donors, aligning with the administration’s public statements. Additional records, also internal to the fundraising effort, provide more detail about the donations and indicate that at least $77 million came from donors who requested anonymity.

A real who’s who of powerful interests buying high on American fascism. And another powerful reason to start treating the thing down on January 20, 2029.

The post The great MAGA circle jerk appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Microsoft, Apple, and Nvidia are among the top donors for United States president Donald Trump’s vanity White House ballroom project, according to a new Washington Post report. Apple and Nvidia both donated $25 million, which is the highest donation amount. Microsoft donated $10 million to the ballroom project that Trump said in 2025 that he and “some friends” were paying for, but the president does not appear on the donor list.

The Washington Post wrote that Nvidia made its donation in October 2025 following a deal with Trump to sell microchips in China, which was previously considered a security concern. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang characterized the donation as contributing “in a small way” in October 2025. The Washington Post reported the company wanted the donation to be anonymous.

“As an American company, our support for the United States is paramount, and independent of any business interests,” Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo told The Washington Post in a statement. “We were proud to be able to make a donation to a nonpartisan trust that serves all Americans and have said so publicly since the donation was made.”

Last week, Trump awarded Huang and other tech CEOs the National Medal of Science.

Nvidia is valued at $5.5 trillion; its semiconductor chips were originally used to power graphics processing units (GPUs) for powerful gaming setups. Now, its chips are used to drive artificial intelligence.

Many of these contributions to the White House ballroom project were reported last year, but the full amounts were not made public. Other donors include the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Foundation (Isaac Perlmutter is Marvel Entertainment’s former CEO) and defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

Prolific first-person shooter level designer Richard "Levelord" Gray died Monday at the age of 68, based on reports shared on social media by Apogee Entertainment yesterday. He had "dealt with cancer on and off for a while now," according to former colleague Joe Siegler.

After studying computer engineering in the '80s and tinkering on some early games in COBOL, Gray broke into the industry at the age of 35 in 1994 with the launch of GrayDoom, a set of four maps for the then-new Doom that were widely shared on CompuServe and beyond. The work attracted the attention of Q Studios' Nick Newhard, who contracted Gray to work on level design for the late '90s cult classic Blood.

Gray was subsequently hired by 3D Realms, where he said he was given free rein in designing "half the levels" for Duke Nukem 3D. There, he was also responsible for the famous, signed "You're Not Supposed to Be Here" easter egg, which players could find only by using cheats to explore outside of the usual confines of the map.

Gray said in a 2016 interview that he assumed the prevalence of cheats in Duke Nukem 3D would mean that "of course, most all of you would be flying around, seeing what you could break, find easter eggs the easy way …bingo! I gave you an easter egg that you had to cheat to find."

Remembering Richard “Levelord” Gray.

In this interview, Richard reflects on the creative freedom he and Allen Blum had while designing the iconic levels of Duke Nukem 3D.

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— Apogee Entertainment (@apogeeent.com) October 14, 2026 at 8:18 AM

In the years following, his level design work appeared in games ranging from SiN to Quake: The Offering to Half-Life: Opposing Force and Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. "The most important duty you have as a level designer is to bring the player 'into' your level," he said in a 1999 interview for the book Game Design: Secrets of the Sages. "It's not until after this submersion that issues like action, game play, and even the Fun Factor enter the game. The more of your level to which the player can attach himself via familiarity, the stronger the player's sense of 'being there' will be."

Gray also made a brief pivot late in his career to casual games such as the Luxor series after FPS maker Ritual Entertainment was acquired by new parent company MumboJumbo. "It does seem sort of a shock at first, from the outside, for sure," he said of the surprise move in a 2007 interview. "Remember, though, making games is making games, a dream job come true! ... To be honest? ...we’re enjoying the hell out of doing something different than hardcore shooters, and the variations within the casual game market makes us even more enthusiastic!"

Gone but not forgotten

Tributes from friends and colleagues have poured in across the Internet since Gray's death was announced. 3D Realms founder Scott Miller called Gray "a stellar talent" and "a relentless hard worker, a fun teammate, and an overall great human. His levels in Duke Nukem 3D and Sin will live on forever."

Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski praised the "sense of place" Gray's levels could create in a game like Duke Nukem 3D. "Few 3D shooters up to that point had it," he wrote. "Instead of a generic hallway you were in an identifiable location. To pull that off with such early/simple tech was a miracle."

I loved the first episode of DN3D but was more drawn in by E2 and E3 that had such distinctive designs. We’re gonna miss you, man. You were one of the best.

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— John Romero (@johnromero.bsky.social) October 13, 2026 at 4:12 PM

Id Software's John Romero remembered Gray as a "great guy" who "was full of life, a gentle soul, and an excellent level designer. He was called 'Levelord' for a reason."

"Richard was, without a doubt, one of the kindest people I’ve ever met in the games industry," Slipgate Ironworks CEO Frederik Schreiber wrote. "Incredibly humble, remarkably intelligent, endlessly creative, and always a pleasure to be around. Despite everything he had accomplished and the enormous influence his work had on my generation of game developers, he never carried himself as anything other than a genuinely good human being."

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