Vodafone announced it has made the world’s first video call from an area of no coverage using a commercial satellite connection and standard mobile phone. The call was touted as the “first space to land gateway in Europe,” connecting satellites with Vodafone’s terrestrial network. Call participants Margherita Della Valle, CEO of Vodafone Group, in a remote area of Wales, and British astronaut Tim Peake, in Newbury, UK, experienced “a full mobile broadband experience” during the groundbreaking connection. Vodafone is working with Starlink rival AST SpaceMobile to bring a commercial satellite-to-mobile broadband service to Europe, possibly this year. Read more

NASCAR has added a new experience that gives spectators a view from race car cockpits with its new “Driver Cam.” Courtesy of TNT Sports and streaming service Max, NASCAR fans were able to see and hear what went on from the driver POV behind the wheel, choosing from among up to 40 vehicles at the 2025 Cook Out Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina this past weekend. Viewers can select and monitor up to four simultaneous feeds with an array of specialized video, audio and graphics features for the duration of the NASCAR Cup Series calendar for 2025, exclusively on Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max. Read more

U.S. Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-California) has introduced a bill to thwart foreign-run pirate websites from exploiting loopholes in U.S. law. H.R. 791 — the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA) — would allow copyright holders to seek court orders requiring U.S. ISPs to block websites operated by foreign infringers who “present a massive and growing threat — costing American jobs, harming the creative community, and exposing consumers to dangerous security risks.” Lofgren said she worked with members of the tech, film and television industries to craft a proposal that remedies copyright violation without disrupting the free Internet for law abiders. Read more

An internecine AI battle has erupted between Alibaba and DeepSeek. Days after DeepSeek dominated several news cycles with its affordable DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model and the multimodal Janus-Pro-7B, Alibaba released its latest LLM, Qwen 2.5-Max, available via API from Alibaba Cloud. As with DeepSeek, Alibaba is looking beyond its domestic borders, but the fact that a public-facing AI battle is heating up between Chinese companies indicates the People’s Republic isn’t going to quietly cede the AI race to the U.S. Alibaba claims Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms models from DeepSeek, Meta and OpenAI. Read more

The National Hockey League is testing an animated recap show aimed at drawing young viewers. “NHL Hockeyverse Matchup of the Week” uses NHL Edge Positional Data to turn NHL player into avatars, creating “a visualization of the on-ice action with stunning realism and dynamic movements,” the league says. The half-hour show premiered February 1 featuring a recap of a January 25 game between the Vancouver Canucks and Washington Capitals. Episodes air on the NHL Network and on the NHL YouTube channel in the U.S. and on Sportsnet in Canada and are expected to continue in the Saturday slot. Read more