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Musk's Starlink Backtracks and Says it Will Comply With Judge's Order to Block X in Brazil

Photo illustration of the logo of the social media platform X (former Twitter) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on August 30, 2024. (Photo by MAURO PIMENTEL / AFP)
Photo illustration of the logo of the social media platform X (former Twitter) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on August 30, 2024. (Photo by MAURO PIMENTEL / AFP)
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Musk's Starlink Backtracks and Says it Will Comply With Judge's Order to Block X in Brazil

Photo illustration of the logo of the social media platform X (former Twitter) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on August 30, 2024. (Photo by MAURO PIMENTEL / AFP)
Photo illustration of the logo of the social media platform X (former Twitter) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on August 30, 2024. (Photo by MAURO PIMENTEL / AFP)

Elon Musk’s satellite-based internet service provider Starlink backtracked Tuesday and said it will comply with a Brazilian Supreme Court justice's order to block the billionaire’s social media platform, X.
Starlink said in a statement posted on X that it will heed Justice Alexandre de Moraes' order despite him having frozen the company's assets. Previously, it informally told the telecommunications regulator that it would not comply until de Moraes reversed course.
“Regardless of the illegal treatment of Starlink in freezing our assets, we are complying with the order to block access to X in Brazil," the company statement said. "We continue to pursue all legal avenues, as are others who agree that @alexandre's recent order violate the Brazilian constitution.”
De Moraes froze Starlink's accounts last week as a means to compel it to cover X’s fines that already exceeded $3 million, reasoning that the two companies are part of the same economic group. Starlink filed an appeal, its law firm Veirano told the Associated Press on Aug. 30, but has declined to comment further in the days since.
Days later, the justice ordered the suspension of X for refusing to name a local legal representative, as required in order to receive notifications of court decisions and swiftly take any requisite action — particularly, in X's case, the takedown of accounts. A Supreme Court panel unanimously upheld the block on Monday, undermining efforts by Musk and his supporters to cast the justice as an authoritarian renegade intent on censoring political speech in Brazil.
Had Starlink continued to disobey de Moraes by providing access, telecommunications regulator Anatel could eventually have seized equipment from Starlink’s 23 ground stations that ensure the quality of its internet service, Arthur Coimbra, an Anatel board member, said on a video call from his office in Brasilia.
Already some legal experts questioned de Moraes’ basis for freezing Starlink’s accounts, given that its parent company SpaceX has no integration with X. Musk noted on X that the two companies have different shareholder structures.
X has clashed with de Moraes over its reluctance to block users — mostly far-right activists accused of undermining Brazilian democracy and allies of former President Jair Bolsonaro — and has alleged that de Moraes wants an in-country legal representative so that Brazilian authorities can exert leverage over the company by having someone to arrest. And Musk has been relentlessly posting in recent days, lambasting de Moraes as a criminal.
“This evil tyrant is a disgrace to judges' robes,” Musk wrote on X along with a photo of de Moraes some 17 hours before Starlink announced its decision to comply with the order.
He hasn't posted about the company's operations in Brazil since its announcement.
The reversal comes as a relief to those in Brazil who have come to depend on Starlink. The company has said it has more than 250,000 customers in the country, many of whom are in remote areas that wouldn’t have fast internet access otherwise.
Before Starlink, internet access in many of these areas came from slow, unstable fixed antennae. Its easy-to-install kits and high-quality connections have transformed communication in some communities, surpassing even major Amazonian cities in speed.
The Forest People Connection project, founded in 2022 with Musk-donated Starlink terminals, has so far brought them to 1,014 remote communities, including riverine and Indigenous peoples. The Yanomami are among them. Living in a far-flung corner of Brazil's rainforest, they had faced a severe health crisis, but now have access to Starlink-powered telemedicine consults and reliable communication for emergency transport of patients.
Improved connectivity has also facilitated illegal activities, such as gold mining.
While Brazil's massive territory with vast rural and forested areas makes it a key growth market for Starlink, its presence isn’t yet as large as Musk has led some to believe. On Sunday, he shared someone else’s post that showed him meeting Bolsonaro in 2022 and noted that the duo claimed to have struck a partnership to bring Starlink to 19,000 schools. Musk touted the deal on X at the time.
It never happened. As of March 2023, SpaceX and the communications ministry hadn’t signed any contract, and only three terminals had been installed in Amazon schools for a 12-month trial period. The ministry’s press office didn't immediately answer an AP request for updated information about these contracts on Tuesday. Brazil’s education ministry told the AP that states are responsible for signing contracts with internet service providers.
Since January 2022, when Starlink began operations in Brazil, it has captured a 0.5 percent share of the internet market, trailing significantly behind leading providers, according to Anatel.
Although Starlink has retreated and says it will now block X, Musk's bravado in recent days has boosted his hero status in the eyes of his fans, said Marietje Schaake, the international policy director at Stanford University Cyber Policy Center.
“The battle of the titans, between de Moraes and Musk, reminds us of how powerful, political and provocative tech leaders have become," said Schaake, who is also author of the forthcoming book “The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley”.
"Brazil won’t be that last country to seek accountability or to put up guardrails.”

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Technology

Huawei Touts New Chipmaking Technology to Sidestep US Restrictions

The Huawei logo is seen at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 12, 2025. (Reuters)
The Huawei logo is seen at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 12, 2025. (Reuters)
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Huawei Touts New Chipmaking Technology to Sidestep US Restrictions

The Huawei logo is seen at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 12, 2025. (Reuters)
The Huawei logo is seen at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 12, 2025. (Reuters)

Chinese tech giant Huawei said on Monday it had developed a new way of making semiconductors that could get around its US-enforced lack of access to the most advanced chipmaking equipment.

Huawei has in recent years been at the center of a geopolitical standoff after Washington warned its equipment could be used for espionage by the Chinese government, an allegation the firm denies.

Sanctions since 2019 have cut Huawei's access to components and technologies made by the United States and some of its allies -- including the lithography machines used to make the world's most advanced chips.

But on Monday the head of Huawei's semiconductor division He Tingbo said that the company will be able to produce next-generation 1.4-nanometre (1.4nm) chips by 2031.

Taiwan's TSMC, the industry leader, has projected it will be able to do the same by 2028.

Cutting-edge chips that can train and power artificial intelligence systems are a crucial and highly sensitive element of the technology rivalry between the United States and China.

The computing power of chips has increased dramatically over the decades as makers cram them with more microscopic electronic components.

Huawei's announcement suggests it might have sidestepped the need for extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, which have been considered crucial for mass manufacturing chips of 5nm or under.

"Over the past six years, I have often been asked... how did you survive and come back on top?" He said in a presentation to the International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) in Shanghai.

She said the new technique came about through a shift in how chipmaking has historically been conceptualized.

"Moore's Law" is a principle developed by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore which states the number of transistors -- devices regulating the flow of electricity -- on a chip doubles every two years.

A higher density of transistors results in a smaller chip or one the same size with faster processing power.

He on Monday proposed "the Tau Scaling Law", or "Her's Law", by which instead of optimizing for space, designers optimize for the time taken for the various elements making up a chip to communicate.

This overcomes a key challenge facing Moore's Law that Intel sums up as: "You can make something smaller and smaller and smaller... until you can't".

US sanctions have meant that "these challenges arrived earlier and are tougher" for Huawei, He said.

"Our solution is feasible and affordable. The performance of the new chip can fully compete with that of the other path," she said.

Huawei's next iteration of its Kirin chip, set to launch in the autumn, will be the first ever to fully adopt an architecture called "LogicFolding" based on the new principle, the company said.

The Tau Scaling Law "underscores the company's ambition to lead rather than follow in the global chip race", said George Chen, Partner and Chair of Digital Practice at The Asia Group.

"Even without a new product launch today, Huawei's intent is clear - and its trajectory will likely heighten US concerns."

Technology

More and More Plastic Surgeons Are Being Asked to Create an ‘AI Face’

Surgeons have noticed consistencies in the aesthetics of “AI face”. (Shutterstock)
Surgeons have noticed consistencies in the aesthetics of “AI face”. (Shutterstock)
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More and More Plastic Surgeons Are Being Asked to Create an ‘AI Face’

Surgeons have noticed consistencies in the aesthetics of “AI face”. (Shutterstock)
Surgeons have noticed consistencies in the aesthetics of “AI face”. (Shutterstock)

Plastic surgeons are increasingly concerned about the rise of “AI face”, as more and more clients arrive in their offices with unrealistic AI-generated visions of what they want to look like, according to The Guardian.

People using AI chatbots to generate their ideal faces are increasingly arriving at surgeons’ offices with briefs demanding flawless skin, sharply sculpted cheekbones, refined noses and near-perfect symmetry – standards that are too time consuming, prohibitively expensive and, in many cases, physically unattainable.

While AI can control every single pixel, “surgery certainly doesn’t work on that microscopic detailed level,” said Dr. Alex Karidis, a surgeon based in west London.

For many clients, however, those expectations are shaped long before they ever meet a surgeon. Karidis and Nugent describe how psychologically effective AI-generated images can be in defining – and reinforcing – clients’ aesthetic ideals.

Dr. Nora Nugent, a cosmetic surgeon from Tunbridge Wells, said: “Once you see an image, it’s wired into you.” Karidis agreed, describing AI images as being “seared” into patients’ minds, and said colleagues had recently been inundated with them.

Surgeons are also keen to emphasize that cosmetic surgery outcomes are far from guaranteed.

“The patient has to understand that there is human variation in how they heal, how they age and what can be done,” said Nugent. “I say to patients beforehand: it’s not limitless what I can do in surgery. Neither of us control everything.”

Surgeons have also noticed consistencies in the aesthetics of “AI face”, particularly hyper-symmetry – something AI can generate effortlessly, but which is often impossible to recreate in real life.

If one of your eyes is a few millimeters higher than the other, AI can alter that in seconds, according to Dr. Julian de Silva, a Harley Street cosmetic surgeon. But rearranging pixels is not the same as rearranging anatomy.

“It’s impossible to change [eye level] because that’s actually set in bone, and your brain sits behind the orbits. You cannot safely change the position of the orbits,” he said.

De Silva added that when AI edits a client’s photo, it frequently defaults to widely accepted beauty ideals: for women, a V-shaped jawline, a sweeping “ogee curve” along the cheekbones and a heart-shaped face; for men, broader jawlines, lower eyebrows and fuller upper eyelids.

But De Silva is also concerned about another growing trend: clinicians sharing surgery results on social media that appear astonishingly effective, but which he suspects may themselves be AI-generated.

“I remember looking at one of these last week and I looked at it over and over,” he said, recalling a video in which a patient appeared to have been made to look 30 years younger. “And then the third time I watched it, I could see ... the hands had six fingers.”

Technology

Hotels Strive to Be Found as AI Models Conduct Travel Search

The rise of AI to plan and book travel will force hotels to make themselves visible when people describe what type of room they would like. JOEL SAGET / AFP/File
The rise of AI to plan and book travel will force hotels to make themselves visible when people describe what type of room they would like. JOEL SAGET / AFP/File
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Hotels Strive to Be Found as AI Models Conduct Travel Search

The rise of AI to plan and book travel will force hotels to make themselves visible when people describe what type of room they would like. JOEL SAGET / AFP/File
The rise of AI to plan and book travel will force hotels to make themselves visible when people describe what type of room they would like. JOEL SAGET / AFP/File

With people increasingly adopting AI to help plan their vacations, hotels are working to make sure that you check them out -- and check in.

Whether using ChatGPT or AI-enabled travel sites like Layla.ai, it is already possible to pose search questions like: "Calm hotel with west-facing balcony" or "Charming hotel with spa that accepts dogs".

This simple switch to plain speech searches belies major technical changes that mean hotels have to learn to become visible to AI models, AFP said.

"We're in complete upheaval: last year 35 percent of French people used artificial intelligence to find a hotel, a cafe or a restaurant," said Nicolas Marette, founder of Cust place, a French company that helps firms optimize their digital presence.

According to a recent study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), around 37 percent of travelers are already using AI-enabled online travel sites to plan and book trips.

Hospitality industry players have taken notice.

A quarter of hospitality firms "have an AI strategy that is starting to produce real returns across multiple organizational activities", according to the BCG report.

"What a hotel needs to do to get well referenced by search engines is not the same thing that they need to do to get referenced by artificial intelligence," said Johanna Benesty at BCG.

Moreover, not all AI models "work in the same way," she added.

- Plain speech, elaborate task -

At French hospitality group Accor, which owns dozens of chains including Pullman, Sofitel, Mercure and Ibis, "we've been trying for a year already to understand how to make ourselves more relevant... and be more visible," the group's AI and data science chief Nicolas Maynard told a recent industry conference.

But that can be a challenge as AI users see fewer options, meaning securing a top ranking becomes even more critical.

"It's a big change: with Google a search gives you 50 results... while if you ask ChatGPT it will give you five" and that is it, Maynard added.

The switch to plain speech means big changes for hotels.

"The biggest challenge is to understand vague requests like 'I want a romantic hotel in the south'," Maynard said.

Because Accor's systems do not currently classify properties by such attributes, the group has its work cut out.

"We need to adapt our systems to take semantics into account," Maynard said.

- Hyper detailed -

But beyond semantics, AI will allow hotels to provide customers with a wealth of information.

Best Western France's director Olivier Cohn said he believed "what will make the difference is our ability to answer client questions more thoroughly".

Hotels could respond to even the most detailed client questions such as "knowing if there is a power socket on the left side of the bed because they are used to sleeping on that side of the bed and charging their devices", he said.

While such questions are simple in and of themselves, current systems and staff can struggle to answer in such detail, said Cohn, whose chain counts more than 4,000 hotels throughout the world.

Some hotels are already deploying AI chatbots to help answer simple guest questions, allowing staff to provide higher-value services.

But winning the referencing game isn't only up to the hotels themselves.

BCG notes that "algorithms elevate properties with comprehensive, high-trust, multisource information over those with sparse or inconsistent digital footprints", meaning that client descriptions and reviews will also be important.

But just like online travel agencies (OTA) charge commissions and offer premium service for a price, AI models are already beginning to do the same.

"The familiar OTA commission model will evolve into AI-era distribution fees, charged for prominence and relevance in algorithmic recommendations," the BCG report said.