Friday the Perseverance rover on Mars made its first attempt to collect a rock sample and seal it in a tube, reports NASA. But unfortunately, the data “indicate that no rock was collected during the initial sampling activity…”
“The sampling process…
ElasticSearch Keeps Fighting Open Source Fork by Amazon AWS
In January ElasticSearch made what it calls “an incredibly hard decision” — to change the licensing on its scalable data-search solution. They called this an effort to “stand up to” Amazon’s AWS for offering ElasticSearch functionality as a servi…
A Critical Ocean System May Be Heading For Collapse Due to Climate Change
The Washington Post reports:
Human-caused warming has led to an “almost complete loss of stability” in the system that drives Atlantic Ocean currents, a new study has found — raising the worrying prospect that this critical aquatic “conveyer bel…
Banned Chinese Facial Recognition Technology Was Used in Search for US Protesters
Some protesters in Minnesota set a fire last year. But then the surveillance footage from that day “set off a nearly yearlong, international manhunt…involving multiple federal agencies and Mexican police. The pursuit also involved a facial recognitio…
New Startup ‘Sentral’ Pushes High-End Rental/Homesharing Apartments
A new $500 million startup is now offering high-end apartments for short- and long-term rentals in America’s “most vibrant, walkable neighborhoods”. (And long-term renters can also avail themselves of its “turn-key homesharing program” to offset some o…
To Fight Vaccine Misinformation, US Recruits an ‘Influencer Army’
The New York Times tells the story of 17-year-old Ellie Zeiler, a TikTok creator with over 10 million followers, who received an email in June from Village Marketing, an influencer marketing agency.
“It said it was reaching out on behalf of another p…
The Case for Another Antitrust Action Against Microsoft
“Since its own brush with antitrust regulation decades ago, Microsoft has slipped past significant scrutiny,” argues a new article from The Atlantic.
But it also asks if there’s now a case for another antitrust action — or if we’re convinced in…
Zoom Agrees to $85M Settlement in Possible Class Action Over Data-Sharing, Zoombombing
Zoom has agreed to pay $85 million — and to bolster its security practices — to settle a lawsuit that had claimed Zoom violated users’ privacy rights by sharing their personal data with Facebook, Google and LinkedIn, and by failing to stop …
Are Python Libraries Riddled With Security Holes?
“Almost half of the packages in the official Python Package Index (PyPI) repository have at least one security issue,” reports TechRadar, citing a new analysis by Finnish researchers, which even found five packages with more than a thousand issues each…
Hundreds of AI Tools Were Built to Catch Covid. None of Them Helped
At the start of the pandemic, remembers MIT Technology Review’s senior editor for AI, the community “rushed to develop software that many believed would allow hospitals to diagnose or triage patients faster, bringing much-needed support to the front li…