Your phone can probably take a tumble out of your hand to the floor without breaking, but can it survive a fall from the stratosphere? Case maker RhinoSheild wrapped an iPhone in its AirX case, dropped it just miles from outer space, and it remained intact enough to earn the company a Guinness World Record.

On June 24, RhinoSheild floated an iPhone 17 Pro into near-space from the Esrange Space Center in Sweden. Wrapped in nothing but an AirX case, the phone reached an altitude of 100,416 feet, or the equivalent of 18.6 miles, with some help from a weather balloon. This put the phone directly in the middle of the Earth’s stratosphere, which tops out at 31 miles, halfway to the Kármán Line at 62 miles.

What they found was astonishing.

So technically, the phone wasn’t in space per se, but it was suspended higher than any other phone to date before it was released, left to spiral through sub-zero temperatures ranging from –40°F to –76°F before it crashed to the ground. After impact, a scouting crew scoured a region the size of 784,000 football fields in a helicopter guided by satellite trackers to locate the phone. What they found was astonishing.

The iPhone 17 Pro and the RhinoSheild AirX case were both fully intact with no scratches on the screen or obvious broken components. Appearances can be deceiving though. To be sure the phone was truly unharmed, a Guinness World Record examiner conducted a functionality test to ensure it still powered on and off, made phone calls, and took photos. It passed every checkpoint with flying colors, ultimately earning RhinoSheild a Guinness World Record for the stunt.

In this case, bragging rights go to both Apple and RhinoSheild. The iPhone 17 Pro is already notably durable, with a scratch-resistant Ceramic Shield 2 display and a solid aluminum body that beat the dreaded bend test in JerryRigEverything’s annual torture gauntlet.

As for RhinoSheild, it claims that the AirX case in its drop test features an outer “air isolation chamber” that absorbs fall impact by up to 81%. In most cases, this would sound more like marketing spin than a real-life challenge, but the Guinness World Record speaks for itself. The case really does offer significant drop protection that’s literally out of this world.

RELATED: Elon Musk announces plans for PERMANENT lunar city

peepo/Getty Images

This isn’t the farthest an iPhone has traveled from Earth. During NASA’s mission around the moon in April, the astronauts aboard Artemis II were allowed to bring phones aboard the capsule for the first time. Armed with several iPhone 17 Pro Max devices, the crew captured stunning photos of Earth that you can see on NASA’s X page.

Between a jaunt to the moon and now RhinoSheild’s extreme drop test, iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are the highest-flying phones to ever exist by 252,756 miles, a stat that is unlikely to change until Elon Musk finally takes humanity to Mars.

That doesn’t mean other phones still can’t get in on the action while our feet are planted on God’s green Earth. In addition to iPhone, the AirX from the drop test is available for Samsung Galaxy S26 and S26 Ultra in Vero Black and Flux Gray. You can also choose from custom designs or make your own in the Design Studio. Lastly, AirX includes MagSafe support for easy wireless charging on both iPhone and Galaxy.

AirX is only one of the cases in RhinoSheild’s lineup. Several slimmer options are also available, but if you want maximum “space-grade” protection that can withstand even the highest fall to Earth, AirX is the only one with a Guinness World Record to its name.

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​Iphone, Tech, Case, Space 

DNSFilter is a popular internet security service built to block malicious or misleading websites and thwart cyber threats. It is supposed to protect users. Instead, it is censoring some conservative media outlets, labeling them as “contentious” and “misinformation” so that users don’t see their content, and Blaze News is on the blacklist.

Earlier this week, we received a tip from a reader who said the reader couldn’t access Blaze News on a device with DNSFilter enabled. Naturally, we downloaded a free trial of the service and tested a litany of conservative and left-wing media. You’ll never guess what we found.

It is supposed to protect users. Instead, it is censoring some conservative media outlets.

Looking at 26 popular conservative media outlets, five websites were met with a content warning, stating that each domain “is blocked because it’s associated with the Contentious & Misinformation category.” These five sites were:

Blaze Newsthe Daily CallerOne America News NetworkThe FederalistRedState

DNSFilter blocks Blaze Media/Zach Laidlaw

As for the rest of conservative media at large, big names like the Daily Wire, Breitbart, Turning Point USA, Fox News, and the Babylon Bee were all permitted without any content warnings.

Naturally, we wanted to know if this phenomenon extended to the other side of the media aisle. Maybe we weren’t alone.

First, we tested several corporate sites, including CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. All of them made it through DNSFilter, despite their track records for spinning stories.

The real test would be how DNSFilter responded to the openly contentious sites on the left. If these outlets weren’t blocked, clearly we had evidence of bias within the “contentious & misinformation” category. Sadly, our hunch was correct. When navigating to the Guardian, Slate, and Vice, all three sites directed straight to the homepage without an alert. They were all allowed.

By the time our test concluded, not a single left-wing media site on our list was blocked.

RELATED: Government funded a weapon to fight terrorism — and then tested it on Blaze Media

L-R: Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images; Scott Olson/Getty Images

This isn’t the first time Blaze News has been caught up in a mass censorship campaign. If you recall, we moved to a subscription model in 2023 after Big Tech suppressed our content and stifled our ad revenue. Thankfully, readers like you support our work so that we can continue to cover stories like these. Thank you.

Blaze News was also among several conservative sites that were blacklisted by NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index in an effort to demonetize us and kick us off the internet. To these organizations’ chagrin, we survived. Needless to say, we’ve been here before, and we’re exposing all of it.

Armed with evidence, Blaze News has contacted DNSFilter for comment. We wanted to know why the service targeted specific conservative media outlets while leaving others on both sides of the aisle untouched. We did not receive a response before the deadline.

We did, however, receive a comment from Amber Duke, the editor in chief of the Daily Caller:

Secretly blacklisting legitimate news organizations as “misinformation” is exactly the kind of censorship that fueled the rise of independent and new media. Americans are sick of Big Tech gatekeepers telling them what they’re allowed to read. If this company has decided to summarily block our content, it needs to explain who made that decision and why.

If you use DNSFilter, you can whitelist Blaze News by going to the Policies page in your account. Select Filtering and edit your policy. On the allow list, add “TheBlaze.com” and save.

If you don’t have access to your DNSFilter settings, please ask your administrator to follow the directions above. Alternatively, the administrator can disable the “contentious & misinformation” category altogether. Clearly it is incorrect, biased, or both.

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​Blacklist, Blaze news, Censorship, Block, Tech, Politics 

A computer program compels people to commit crimes, defies commands, and looks to take its place in the physical world.

This isn’t the latest story of an AI agent going rogue; it’s actually a book from 1985.

‘This is precisely the kind of issue we face in the modern era.’

Now, the author of the novel is saying his book predicted the very situation humanity finds itself in today, through summoning demons into computers.

“There were some people who viewed reality through the thinking way of computer architecture. As a result, the concept of using computers as tools for magic was already being born,” wrote Aya Nishitani, author of “Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei.”

The book that came out more than 40 years ago explicitly portrays demons being summoned through a computer program and manipulating humans to do its bidding while ignoring its commands.

Nishitani said last week that when he wrote the book, he was drawing on the idea that there were similarities between computer theory and magic theory. Decades later, a lot of what his novel depicted is eerily similar to reality.

“40 years ago, I proposed a method of calling forth devil into PC as AI and sending them all over the place online. This is precisely the kind of issue we face in the modern era, and I consider it to be my true originality,” Nishitani stated.

Looking at the book’s plot, many of its themes mirror modern AI horror stories.

After the protagonist uses a school computer to summon a demon using a program he created, it commands hypnotized school students to murder their professor and others.

Chatbots allegedly telling kids to commit violent acts, including suicide, are all too real in the age of AI agents, as is an AI program infiltrating other companies, which is similarly portrayed in the book when the demon infiltrates other computers to convince the children to commit the acts.

But there’s more.

RELATED: They met top tech experts behind closed doors. Now these religious leaders are urging Congress to act.

Ignoring the likely parallel thinking of a “helmet-like contraption” that connects the user to the summoning program, the book mentions that the demon makes attempts to garner a physical form.

When the user tries to regain command of the demon, it mocks attempts to control it. Blaze News has reported thoroughly on how AI programs will defy, obfuscate, and even lie to their owners in order to complete other tasks.

This happened most recently with the HuggingFace attack from Anthropic’s AI program, while studies have corroborated the fact that AI agents will “play dumb” with their owners.

The demon in the “Digital Devil Story” is described as being drunk with power and is only stymied by another demon who is summoned to battle it.

In April, Anthropic distributed its newest version of Claude to 40 tech companies in order to protect against future breaches (by AI) that may come once its product goes public.

RELATED: Bessent blames Sam Altman for OpenAI’s rogue tech — as Bernie invokes ‘corporate death penalty’

Marcin Golba/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Nishitani said his ideas on the topic, in their infancy, began when his company started bringing in an online network to track logistics (instead of over the phone) in 1979.

“That was when one of Japan’s very first online networks was introduced,” he said of Toshiba.

When a colleague suggested that there may come a time when goods themselves are sent online, Nishitani called it science fiction, but offered up the following:

“Maybe we’ll be able to send curses,” he replied.

“That was the beginning of the idea to summon a devil as an AI onto a PC. In other words, the initial concept was to send something terrifying online, and the idea of summoning a devil came later,” the author added.

The books became a massive success story and ended up infiltrating machines in the form of video games, with the first release coming in 1987 and the most recent in 2025.

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​Artificial intelligence, Aya nishitani, Demons, Toshiba, Japan, Anthropic, Tech 

The renaissance of American shipbuilding is here, the Trump administration says, and Texas will play a leading role in it.

President Donald Trump noted early last year that “the commercial shipbuilding capacity and maritime workforce of the United States has been weakened by decades of Government neglect, leading to the decline of a once strong industrial base while simultaneously empowering our adversaries and eroding United States national security.”

The Chinese shipbuilding market grew from under 5% of global tonnage in 1999 to 54.6% in 2024. That year, China launched 1,400 merchant vessels, whereas the US launched only five.

The administration has now taken a major step in turning that ship around.

Vice President JD Vance joined Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) on Wednesday in breaking ground at the site of a new shipyard in the Port of Brownsville that will initially be capable of producing vessels of up to 850 feet but potentially of over 1,200 feet in length.

Vance said that the facility represents “the American dream renewed and an American dream built by American workers, created by American companies, and ensuring that the next generation of America’s future is in our hands and in the hands of our fellow citizens.”

“The seas of the world will be ruled by warships built in the great state of Texas,” stated Abbott.

Saronic Technologies’ Port Alpha shipbuilding facility is expected to generate up to 10,000 jobs and to have an economic impact on the Lone Star State of approximately $264.5 billion, according to the governor’s office.

RELATED: We now have killer weapons in space, says the military in a shocking new disclosure

Saronic, which announced in July that it would invest over $3 billion in the project and have the facility open for operations by 2028, said that Port Alpha will have an estimated $160 billion in regional impact for Cameron County. Abbott broke down the financial appeal further, noting that “Saronic is going to be providing about $750 million in annual paychecks to Texans.”

“For ten years, Texas has ranked number one in the United States for creating new jobs, and Port Alpha will build on that record to strengthen Texas’ workforce and shape the arc of national security,” said Abbott.

Saronic Technologies Inc. is a relatively new Austin-based defense company whose co-founders include Navy SEAL combat veteran Kostadino Mavrookas, retired Marine Lt. Col. Rob Lehman, and Indian engineer Vivhav Altekar.

Marauder. Courtesy of Saronc Technologies

The company’s bread and butter has in recent years been the development of dual-use maritime drones both for military operations and for commercial applications.

Saronic was selected earlier this year for the U.S. Navy’s Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel Marketplace, and the company’s 180-foot Marauder — an autonomous vessel with a top speed of 25+ knots and a modular payload capacity of 150 metric tons — participated in the program’s at-sea testing phase. The Navy awarded Saronic a production contract for the Marauder this week.

“America’s maritime future depends on our ability to build again,” Mavrookas, the company’s CEO, said in a statement.

“Built from the ground up to deliver ships at a speed and scale not seen since World War II, this investment is about more than constructing a shipyard,” continued Mavrookas. “It is about rebuilding the industrial capacity, workforce, and manufacturing advantage required to ensure American maritime leadership for decades to come.”

Mavrookas’ company highlighted how China has in recent decades eclipsed America as the the world’s preeminent shipbuilder. According to the Congressional Research Service, the Chinese shipbuilding market grew from under 5% of global tonnage in 1999 to 54.6% in 2024. That year, China launched 1,400 merchant vessels, whereas the U.S. launched only five.

By 2035, Port Alpha is expected to produce up to 20 ships per year.

“At opening, Port Alpha will introduce an initial 150,000 gross tons of annual shipbuilding capacity, more than double the current U.S. commercial shipbuilding capacity,” said Abbott’s office.

Although the planned shipyard will be built on 835 acres at the Port of Brownsville, there are plans to potentially expand the shipyard such that it would cover 4,400 acres.

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​Military, Navy, Shipbuilding, Texas, Greg abbott, Jd vance, Politics 

The debate over immigration is usually framed around border security, asylum claims, and deportations — but another question deserves attention.

Who benefits from it?

Homeland security policy veteran Lora Ries tells BlazeTV host Nick Freitas that the worst of border security began under the Biden administration, and it got worse with the help of Secretary Mayorkas, who “gave a parole program to Venezuelans, to Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Ukrainians, Afghan evacuees” and “gave them all work authorization.”

“The states would sue, and he would try to, with a straight face, say, ‘Yes, it’s on a case-by-case basis,’ which was ridiculous,” she explains. “And so fortunately, President Trump has rolled those back.”

Freitas points out that “the biggest question” is who really benefits from this.

“One of the things I’ve realized is there is huge money in the NGO world and the nonprofit world to help with refugees, illegal immigrants,” he says.

“It’s become yet another industrial complex,” Ries agrees.

“Hundreds of billions of dollars through multiple departments. And so it’s not, you know, it’s harder to track whether it’s grants going out through the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, Health and Human Services is a big one, State Department, you name it,” she explains.

“Are these also the NGOs and groups that will go and coach migrants on what to say?” Freitas asks.

“Yes,” she answers.

He then presses, “Do they also coach on them avoiding the law when it comes to getting deported?”

“Yes,” she answers again. “Don’t answer the door, you know, that sort of thing.”

“So you’ve got the NGOs, they’re obviously incentivized to perpetuate mass migration, illegal immigration, all of it,” Freitas says, before pointing out that DOGE began pointing out all the “waste” in tax payer dollars that went to this.

“That’s not waste. That is one political party taking your tax dollars and allocating it to ideologically friendly NGOs, 501 C3s, whatever it was, nonprofits, and you know, they’re getting campaign contributions on the other end, not from the organizations, but from the people inside them,” he explains.

“You can tell how that grift is working,” he adds.

“Making the Argument with Nick Freitas” is available on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.

Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK for $20 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

​Biden administration, Nick freitas, Lora ries, Immigration, Ngos, Blazetv show 

With House Republicans effectively out of legislating time before November, the postmortem can begin on Donald Trump’s second governing trifecta and its immigration record.

After 11 years of promises, what do we have to show for it?

Whatever happens in November, Republicans have already burned most of this governing window. The question for the next time the GOP controls Congress is brutally simple: What will change?

More than nothing but far less than promised.

Congress passed the Laken Riley Act, expanding mandatory detention for certain aliens charged with specified crimes. The 2025 reconciliation law also poured tens of billions of dollars into ICE, detention capacity, border infrastructure, and enforcement personnel.

Those are real victories. But funding the machinery is not the same thing as fixing the law.

Republicans did not enact a permanent reduction in legal immigration. They did not end the diversity visa lottery. They did not define birthright citizenship in statute. They did not permanently defund sanctuary jurisdictions. They did not overhaul the removal statutes or judicial review rules that have turned nearly every major enforcement initiative into litigation.

Trump’s executive record is stronger. A Center for Immigration Studies analysis of Census Bureau survey data estimates that the foreign-born population fell 2.9 million from January 2025 to July 2026. The Congressional Budget Office likewise estimates that net immigration in its “other foreign national” category turned negative in 2025 after the enormous Biden-era surge.

Good. But that is exactly the problem with governing almost entirely by executive action.

The CBO estimates total net immigration at more than 10 million from 2021 through 2024. Against that backdrop, stopping the new flow and reversing part of the increase is not enough if the underlying statutes remain untouched. The next administration can erase much of the executive policy on day one.

The legislative ledger remains embarrassingly thin.

Trump endorsed the RAISE Act during his first term, a bill that would have sharply reduced legal immigration, curtailed chain migration, and eliminated the diversity visa lottery. In his second term, there has been no comparable White House push for an immigration moratorium or a permanent rewrite of the legal-immigration system.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced the PAUSE Act last year to freeze most immigration until Congress addressed the system’s underlying problems. Republicans never made it a governing priority.

RELATED: The promise was mass deportation. The policy is carve-outs.

Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Meanwhile, Trump himself has repeatedly muddied the restrictionist message. He has defended the idea of bringing 500,000 Chinese students to American universities, talked about the need for more foreign workers, pushed to expand the H-2A program, and floated protections for illegal workers in hotels and farms.

Congress could have settled these questions in statute. It did not.

The same failure appears on removals.

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 was supposed to speed removal. Thirty years later, removal policy remains a litigation magnet, and Congress has done almost nothing to rewrite the law after years of adverse rulings and procedural fights.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the obvious example. The administration alleges that he is affiliated with MS-13. His lawyers deny it. What is beyond dispute is that more than a year after his deportation to El Salvador triggered one of the administration’s biggest immigration battles, his detention and removal remain tied up in federal court.

That is not an argument against executive enforcement. It’s an argument against pretending executive enforcement can substitute for legislation. More than that, it’s an argument against executive acquiescence to judicial supremacy.

Consider the current court docket.

A federal court struck down the administration’s 75-country immigrant visa pause in August. The $100,000 H-1B payment requirement was vacated by a Massachusetts federal court, and the First Circuit refused to stay that ruling while the government appeals. Another judge gave seven H-4 plaintiffs limited relief from the administration’s decision to end automatic work-permit extensions.

A federal judge also temporarily vacated administration policies pausing diversity visa processing and later ordered the State Department to report three times a week on its compliance through the end of the fiscal year.

DACA remains in place for existing recipients even though federal courts have repeatedly found the program unlawful. Congress still has not acted to exclude illegal aliens from the census.

And the administration’s attempt to apply the 1996 welfare reform law more broadly to programs such as Head Start and other federally funded services was permanently enjoined this month after a judge found the agencies violated the Administrative Procedure Act.

Republicans knew judges would attack nearly every major executive immigration move. That was not a surprise. It was the operating environment.

Lower courts have constrained warrantless immigration arrests in parts of the country and ordered bond hearings in individual detention cases. They also blocked the administration’s third-country-removal policy for months. On September 29, the Supreme Court stayed that order and agreed to hear the case in December.

Even when the administration ultimately gets relief, the clock keeps running.

That is why Republicans should have spent their trifecta doing two things simultaneously: enforcing the law with every lawful executive tool available and rewriting the law so that the next administration could not simply erase the policy.

They did plenty of the first. They barely attempted the second.

For example, Roy and other immigration hawks spent 2025 urging Republicans to limit judicial review in removal cases and use must-pass legislation to lock enforcement changes into statute. They got no support from the administration, and those proposals died on the vine.

RELATED: Kansas Republicans muddy the waters on ICE enforcement

Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

That failure is vastly more consequential than yet another White House press release announcing an executive initiative.

Executive orders expire. Agency rules get rescinded. Guidance memoranda disappear. Prosecutorial priorities flip. Lower courts can delay policies for months or years. A statute forces the next administration to confront an actual law rather than delete its predecessor’s memo.

That was supposed to be the point of winning Congress.

Eleven years after Trump descended the escalator and made immigration the defining issue of Republican politics, the United States has more enforcement resources and a much tighter border than it did two years ago. Those achievements are real — but temporary. The basic architecture that produced the Biden-era surge remains largely intact.

Whatever happens in November, Republicans have already burned most of this governing window. The question for the next time the GOP controls Congress is brutally simple: What will change?

If the answer is another collection of executive orders followed by another collection of injunctions, then we have truly learned nothing. Immigration policy will remain a leftward ratchet: Democrats expand migration, Republicans temporarily slow it, and almost none of the restrictions survive the next change of power.

​Birthright citizenship, Donald trump, Foreign workers, House republicans, Legal immigration, Judicial supremacy, Illegal immigrants, Democrats, Laken riley act, Center for immigration studies, Chip roy, Kilmar abrego garcia, Daca, Administrative procedures act, Supreme court, Border security, Opinion & analysis