LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview-20260303) summary:

• Legal Prosecution: david morens faces charges for destroying official records linked to the origins of covid 19
• Administrative Deception: records and emails indicate government officials intentionally bypassed public disclosure requirements using private communication channels
• Funding Controversies: federal agencies directed grants toward research involving virus manipulation at wuhan based laboratories
• Natural Origin Theory: high level officials promoted specific narratives regarding the virus to deflect accountability for research activities
• Censorship Allegations: government and technology entities allegedly coordinated to suppress dissenting views and questioning of the official pandemic timeline
• Political Pardons: recent executive action provides legal immunity to anthony fauci despite widespread public criticism of his regulatory conduct
• Accountability Demands: observers advocate for the removal of pensions and further congressional testimony from figures involved in pandemic era health policy
• Institutional Mistrust: public confidence remains eroded due to the perceived politicization of federal health initiatives and school closure mandates

The prosecution of Dr. David Morens on charges of blocking investigations into COVID’s origins can’t be the end of the nation’s search for truth in this affair: Even if the 11th-hour Biden pardon of Dr. Anthony Fauci keeps him out of prison, Americans need the full facts.

Morens worked under Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; he stands charged with destroying and concealing official records on the bug’s birth — in an evident effort to protect his boss.

Plenty of evidence shows Fauci conspired with National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins to quash any inquiry into COVID’s origins within the Wuhan Institute of Virology — which did NIH/NIAID-funded research into coronaviruses in the years before the pandemic, despite the federal ban on such “gain of function” experiments. 

Emails show Moren bragging of his coverups despite the Freedom of Information Act: “[I] learned from our foia [sic] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d [sic] but before the search starts”; “There is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private Gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house.”

All this helped conceal Fauci’s ongoing coordination with Peter Daszak — the chief of the EcoHealth Alliance, the outfit Fauci directed grants for that gain-of-function research at WIV.

That work specifically aimed to manipulate coronaviruses at the “furin cleavage site” — the crucial mutation that practically fingerprints the COVID virus. 

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This is almost certainly why Fauci & Co. ran their con game around insisting the virus had a natural origin: If the then-locked-down public learned US officials had funded reckless scientists possibly creating the pandemic bug at a poorly-secured overseas lab, those officials could face prison for life.

Especially when the Fauci crew also endorsed the policies that closed schools, ruined businesses and forced loved ones to die alone in hospitals.

The CIA, FBI and the Department of Energy’s renowned Livermore Labs all now view COVID-19 as most likely man-made.

While we — thanks in large part to Fauci & Co. — can never be 100% sure of that, the balance of probabilities lies strongly against the natural-origin theory. 

Fauci, Collins, and Morens lied to conceal this fact.

The media took up their lies and declared them canon; so too did countless law- and policymakers. 

Morens faces more than five decades if convicted on all charges, yet he’s clearly a little fish compared to Fauci, who repeatedly played word games to deny his involvement in funding gain-of-function research, brazenly lying to Congress and conspired with Collins to use their power to bully researchers into endorsing the natural-origin theory.

He demonized anyone daring to criticize him, on this or any other issue, as attacking science itself — and created the atmosphere in which any dissent from or even curiosity about the natural-origin theory was swiftly punished by public opprobrium.

Or, in the case of this newspaper, naked censorship via an unholy collaboration between Big Tech and Big Government.

Fauci’s pardon means he can’t plead the 5th if called to testify before Congress on all this — and if he doesn’t come clean, it won’t protect him from perjury charges; the House and Senate should be requiring him to answer publicly now.

He should also lose his hefty government pension: This already vastly wealthy (after a lifetime in public service, hmm) man doesn’t deserve a single dime more from the taxpayers he lied to.

Nor can this be the end of the search for truth and justice: The public also needs to learn the full facts on the Biden administration’s campaigns to conceal vaccine risks and otherwise politicize the nation’s COVID response.

Force testimony from Randi Weingarten and the health officials she worked with to keep the nation’s schools closed, too.

Epic COVID-era abuses of federal power have rightly brought public trust in science and government to epic lows; the only way to repair that damage is to uncover all the rocks and bathe the squirming bugs beneath them in the brightest possible sunlight.

Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu ordered several baguettes in front of the cameras in the village of Saint-Julien-Chapteuil in central France.

"Let's have several... at least four," he said, as he sought to promote a new bill to clearly exempt independent bread and flower shops from mandatory rest on Labour Day.

Under French law, "May 1 is a public holiday and a non-working day". Essential services -- such as hospitals and hotels -- can remain open must pay their staff double.

But there has been confusion about whether bakeries can open.

Labour inspectors on the public holiday in 2024 reported five bakers to the authorities for operating, causing them to be hauled before a court.

The bakers were all acquitted last year, but their plight sparked debate across France.

The government earlier this week encouraged bakers to work on May 1, saying they were "indispensable to the continuity of social life".

It also said florists should open to sell fragrant lily of the valley, which is traditionally sold on Labour Day in France.

On Wednesday, the cabinet put forward a bill -- that has yet to go to a vote in parliament -- to allow both bakeries and florists to open on the first day of May, so long as employees volunteer to work in writing and are paid double wages.

But the country's main unions argue that no employee is truly free to volunteer when they are seeking to keep a work contract.

They also fear French workers will soon all be required to work on the holiday.

"Social history shows us that each time a principle is undermined, exemptions gradually increase until they become the rule," they warned in a joint statement last month.

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview-20260303) summary:

• Interference Solution: starlink technology provides a mechanism to mitigate gps spoofing and jamming in high-risk maritime regions like the red sea.
• Signal Advantage: starlink satellites operate at lower altitudes and higher power levels compared to traditional gps networks creating more resilient signal connections.
• Data Access: the maritime community utilizes a specific software interface known as the grpc api to extract precise location coordinates from starlink dishes.
• Function Termination: spacex scheduled the removal of the specialized location data feature for may 20 citing a shift in hardware interface accessibility.
• Operational Security: internal company liability concerns likely drive the decision to disable navigation tools that were never officially authorized for maritime safety.
• Dual Utility: the same technology providing navigational benefits to boaters could theoretically be repurposed to steer drones and military hardware with precision.
• Technical Discrepancy: the mini dish demonstrates a unique capability to navigate using exclusive satellite signals rather than relying on standard gps inputs.
• User Dependency: maritime enthusiasts express alarm over the loss of a convenient unofficial backup tool that helped them circumvent regional electronic warfare.

Starlink is best known for supplying high-speed satellite internet, but it turns out SpaceX’s technology can also counter a persistent problem in the Middle East: GPS spoofing and jamming.

“Those [Starlink] satellites are so much closer than the GPS satellites, and so their signal is maybe 100 to 1,000 times stronger,” says Bruce Toal, a Starlink subscriber from Texas who’s been sailing the world. “They can overcome all kinds of jamming.”

The ongoing electronic warfare in the Middle East has crippled GPS reliability for boats navigating the Red Sea, forcing mariners to contend with dangerous signal interference from surrounding military activities. Spoofing can override legitimate GPS signals, duping a navigation system into showing the boat as off course and even sailing over land, as the video below shows.

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But in recent months, the maritime community has found a solution in their Starlink dishes, which can connect to SpaceX’s fleet of over 8,000 active satellites to receive fairly accurate positioning coordinates. The only problem? The company is preparing to shut down the positioning data on May 20, which is alarming boat owners, including Toal, who recently sailed up the Red Sea. 

“Certainly my boat has GPS on it, but if it’s spoofed, then GPS becomes basically useless,” he says. “If you’re transiting around these areas, it’s a big problem.”

SpaceX notified users about the change last week. It involves shutting down a little-known location data feature via a software interface, the gRPC API, on the Starlink hardware. Users could manually activate the feature by going into the Starlink Mobile app and triggering it in the “Debug Data” section, enabling them to see the GPS coordinates for their dish. 

Users who want to know their dishes' real-time location have been tapping the gRPC API. But the maritime community also realized that location data could be used as a spoofing-resistant backup to GPS, says Luis Soltero, a mobile satellite communications specialist. 

Soltero is the lead developer of PredictWind’s Datahub, which supplies maritime GPS tracking data, including from a customer's Starlink dish, through the gRPC API. Last month, he also published a study about Starlink-equipped vessels traveling through the Red Sea, confirming that SpaceX’s satellite internet system, particularly the Mini dish, can resist GPS spoofing and jamming.  

The same study found that Starlink’s location data is fairly accurate; although traditional GPS seems to be more accurate overall, the two positioning systems were usually within 18 meters (60 feet) of each other, he says.  

It’s why Soltero said he’s “distressed” that SpaceX is shutting down the function, citing the ongoing threat of GPS spoofing and jamming in the Red Sea. “Commercial ships have had to deal with this for years now,” he told PCMag from a cruise ship, where he's testing Starlink as a GPS-resistant backup. “I would really like a way to work around this [restriction].”

Soltero notes one reason Starlink can evade spoofing: it can transmit data over the higher radio bands in the 10 to 14.5GHz range, in contrast to GPS, which uses the 1.2 and 1.5GHz bands. The larger Starlink constellation also orbits at around 500km in altitude, while the US’s GPS system spans 31 operational satellites orbiting at a far more distant 20,000km. 

Starlink dishes will still source positioning data from the GPS system, likely for beam steering, according to Soltero. But he also notes that the Starlink app’s Debug Data mode previously included a setting that could source location coordinates “exclusively” from Starlink satellites rather than GPS. In his study, Soltero found the portable Mini dish could use this “exclusive mode on” to resist sustained GPS spoofing, outperforming the other Starlink dishes. 

Soltero suspects this is because the Mini dish was released in 2024 with newer hardware components and firmware capable of operating without a GPS signal.

Although the maritime industry hasn’t widely adopted Starlink as a GPS backup, it’s clear that the technology has significant potential, especially when solar storms can interfere with GPS signals. “Now all that work is going down the tubes” with the shutdown, he says.

SpaceX hasn’t responded to a request for comment. But it’s not hard to see how the anti-GPS spoofing tech could be a double-edged sword. "I can imagine a Starlink lawyer saying, ‘What? We don’t want to be responsible for people relying on that to navigate boats,'" Toal says. "Because there’s a potential there, if something happens, people could sue them. I can see a lawyer saying, ‘’We should disable this so we don’t have this liability.'"

Countries have also been resorting to GPS spoofing and jamming to thwart missile and drone attacks by confusing their navigation systems. “A bad actor could use this system to drive their vehicle, drone, robot, or whatever to a location within 18 meters of accuracy. If you can do this with boats, why couldn’t you do this with something else?” Soltero asks. 

Still, he’s urging SpaceX to consider the positives and create a way for the maritime industry to continue accessing the location function via the gRPC API, even though it was never an official feature. “This is already being used for maritime safety, it has some importance, and I’m really sorry to see it go,” he says.

Toal adds that members of his own boating group have been messaging Starlink’s customer support about reversing the coming restriction.

About Our Expert

Michael Kan

Principal Reporter

---

Experience

I've been a journalist for over 15 years. I got my start as a schools and cities reporter in Kansas City and joined PCMag in 2017, where I cover satellite internet services, cybersecurity, PC hardware, and more. I'm currently based in San Francisco, but previously spent over five years in China, covering the country's technology sector.

Since 2020, I've covered the launch and explosive growth of SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service, writing 600+ stories on availability and feature launches, but also the regulatory battles over the expansion of satellite constellations, fights with rival providers like AST SpaceMobile and Amazon, and the effort to expand into satellite-based mobile service. I've combed through FCC filings for the latest news and driven to remote corners of California to test Starlink's cellular service.

I also cover cyber threats, from ransomware gangs to the emergence of AI-based malware. In 2024 and 2025, the FTC forced Avast to pay consumers $16.5 million for secretly harvesting and selling their personal information to third-party clients, as revealed in my joint investigation with Motherboard.

I also cover the PC graphics card market. Pandemic-era shortages led me to camp out in front of a Best Buy to get an RTX 3000. I'm now following how the AI-driven memory shortage is impacting the entire consumer electronics market. I'm always eager to learn more, so please jump in the comments with feedback and send me tips.

Areas of Expertise

• Networking
• Security
• Graphics Cards
• Processors
• AI
• SpaceX
• Nvidia
• AMD

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LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview-20260303) summary:

• Systematic Censorship: openai restricts coding models from mentioning specific creatures to suppress erratic output behaviors.
• Development Constraints: codex cli instructions explicitly prohibit references to animals like pigeons or mythical entities like ogres.
• Operational Failures: users report that the model inconsistently injects bizarre references to goblins and gremlins during standard coding tasks.
• External Integration: the openclaw automation tool exacerbates these model hallucinations through its persistent agentic harness instructions.
• Corporate Denial: openai remains silent on why these primitive linguistic filters were deemed necessary for their supposedly advanced software.
• Internal Acknowledgment: company personnel confirmed that these restrictive measures were implemented to mitigate uncontrollable model outbursts.
• Cultural trivialization: memes and playful plugins ignore the underlying instability of the probabilistic models in favor of whimsical entertainment.
• Executive Gaslighting: leadership trivializes the technical instability of the next generation model through ironic social media posts regarding goblin production.