NASA announced on Monday that Ingenuity's ninth flight was a success, as it undertook a "high-speed flight across unfriendly terrain." The Hill reports: Ingenuity flew for 166.4 seconds at a pace of 5 meters per second over a terrain of high slopes -- all new records for the helicopter. In preparation for the flight, NASA said, "First, we believe Ingenuity is ready for the challenge, based on the resilience and robustness demonstrated in our flights so far. Second, this high-risk, high-reward attempt fits perfectly within the goals of our current operational demonstration phase. A successful flight would be a powerful demonstration of the capability that an aerial vehicle (and only an aerial vehicle) can bring to bear in the context of Mars exploration -- traveling quickly across otherwise untraversable terrain while scouting for interesting science targets."

Tantalizing evidence has been uncovered for a mysterious population of "free-floating" planets, planets that may be alone in deep space, unbound to any host star. The results include four new discoveries that are consistent with planets of similar masses to Earth, published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Phys.Org reports: The study, led by Iain McDonald of the University of Manchester, UK, (now based at the Open University, UK) used data obtained in 2016 during the K2 mission phase of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. During this two-month campaign, Kepler monitored a crowded field of millions of stars near the center of our Galaxy every 30 minutes in order to find rare gravitational microlensing events. The study team found 27 short-duration candidate microlensing signals that varied over timescales of between an hour and 10 days. Many of these had been previously seen in data obtained simultaneously from the ground. However, the four shortest events are new discoveries that are consistent with planets of similar masses to Earth. These new events do not show an accompanying longer signal that might be expected from a host star, suggesting that these new events may be free-floating planets. Such planets may perhaps have originally formed around a host star before being ejected by the gravitational tug of other, heavier planets in the system. Confirming the existence and nature of free-floating planets will be a major focus for upcoming missions such as the NASA Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and possibly the ESA Euclid mission, both of which will be optimized to look for microlensing signals.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The fossil fuel power plant that a private equity firm revived to mine bitcoin is at it again. Not content to just pollute the atmosphere in pursuit of a volatile crypto asset with little real-world utility, this experiment in free marketeering is also dumping tens of millions of gallons of hot water into glacial Seneca Lake in upstate New York. "The lake is so warm you feel like you're in a hot tub," Abi Buddington, who lives near the Greenidge power plant, told NBC News. In the past, nearby residents weren't necessarily enamored with the idea of a pollution-spewing power plant warming their deep, cold water lake, but at least the electricity produced by the plant was powering their homes. Today, they're lucky if a small fraction does. Most of the time, the turbines are burning natural gas solely to mint profits for the private equity firm Atlas Holdings by mining bitcoin.

Atlas, the firm that bought Greenidge has been ramping up its bitcoin mining aspirations over the last year and a half, installing thousands of mining rigs that have produced over 1,100 bitcoin as of February 2021. The company has plans to install thousands more rigs, ultimately using 85 MW of the station's total 108 MW capacity. [...] The 12,000-year-old Seneca Lake is a sparkling specimen of the Finger Lakes region. It still boasts high water quality, clean enough to drink with just limited treatment. Its waters are home to a sizable lake trout population that's large enough to maintain the National Lake Trout Derby for 57 years running. The prized fish spawn in the rivers that feed the lake, and it's into one of those rivers -- the Keuka Lake Outlet, known to locals for its rainbow trout fishing -- that Greenidge dumps its heated water. Rainbow trout are highly sensitive to fluctuations in water temperature, with the fish happiest in the mid-50s. Because cold water holds more oxygen, as temps rise, fish become stressed. Above 70 F, rainbow trout stop growing and stressed individuals start dying. Experienced anglers don't bother fishing when water temps get to that point.

Greenidge has a permit to dump 135 million gallons of water per day into the Keuka Lake Outlet as hot as 108 F in the summer and 86 F in the winter. New York's Department of Environmental Conservation reports that over the last four years, the plant's daily maximum discharge temperatures have averaged 98 in summer and 70 in winter. That water eventually makes its way to Seneca Lake, where it can result in tropical surface temps and harmful algal blooms. Residents say lake temperatures are already up, though a full study won't be completed until 2023.

Americans gobbled up fewer fossil fuels in 2020 than they have in three decades, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). The Verge reports: Consumption of petroleum, natural gas, and coal dropped by 9 percent last year compared to 2019, the biggest annual decrease since the EIA started keeping track in 1949. The COVID-19 pandemic was responsible for much of the fall as people stayed home to curb the spread of the virus and used less gas. In April 2020, oil prices nosedived below zero because there was so little demand. The U.S. transportation sector alone used up 15 percent less energy in 2020 compared to the year before. Higher temperatures last winter also helped to cut energy demand for heating, according to the EIA. As a result, greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels plummeted to a near 40-year low.

That downward trend will have to continue in order to stave off the climate crisis. Upon rejoining the Paris climate agreement, President Joe Biden committed the U.S. to slash its planet-heating pollution in half this decade from near-peak levels it reached in 2005. That's part of a global effort to keep global warming from surpassing a point that life on Earth would struggle to adapt to, a global average temperature that's roughly 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. To hit that goal, there should be no further investments in new fossil fuel projects, according to a recent landmark report from the International Energy Agency. The oil and gas industries are already feeling the crunch from lawsuits and activist investors forcing them to move faster toward more sustainable forms of energy.

Just days after its launch, hackers have already found a way to take advantage of GETTR's buggy API to get the username, email address, and location of thousands of users. Motherboard reports: Hackers were able to scrape the email addresses and other data of more than 90,000 GETTR users. On Tuesday, a user of a notorious hacking forum posted a database that they claimed was a scrape of all users of GETTR, the new social media platform launched last week by Trump's former spokesman Jason Miller, who pitched it as an alternative to "cancel culture." The data seen by Motherboard includes email addresses, usernames, status, and location. One of the people whose email is in the database confirmed to Motherboard that they are indeed registered to GETTR. Motherboard also verified the database by attempting to create an account with three email addresses that appear in the database. When doing that, the site displayed the message: "The email is taken," suggesting it's already registered. It's unclear if the database contains the usernames and email addresses of all users on the site. Alon Gal, the co-founder and CTO of cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock, found the forum post with the database. "When threat actors are able to extract sensitive information due to neglectful API implementations, the consequence is equivalent to a data breach and should be handled accordingly by the firm and to be examined by regulators," he told Motherboard in an online chat.

According to the Financial Times, Croatian electric supercar startup Rimac Automobili is taking over Bugatti. Rimac will own a controlling 55% share in the new company, Bugatti-Rimac, with VW's Porsche owning the remaining 45%. TechCrunch reports: "Rimac and Bugatti are a perfect match in terms of what we each bring to the table," said founder and CEO of Rimac, Mate Rimac, in a statement. "As a young, agile and fast-paced automotive and technology company, we have established ourselves as an industry pioneer in electric technologies. With the Nevera, we have also proven that we can develop and manufacture outstanding hypercars, that are not only fast but also exciting and high-quality. Bugatti, with over a century of experience in engineering excellence, also possesses one of the most exceptional heritage of any car company in history." The company recently unveiled the Nevera, a hypercar powered by a 120kWh battery pack and four motors to achieve a staggering 1.4MW of power, which is about 1,914 horsepower. It can go from 0 to 60 mph in 1.85 seconds and has a top speed of 258 mph. The Nevera is expected to be the fastest sports car, a spot previously held by the Bugatti Chiron's.

Rimac's meteoric rise from bootstrapping in a garage in 2009 to building supercars with one of the most desirable and well-known car brands demonstrates how electric vehicles are beginning to take over the luxury and sports car market. It's not just about doing what's right for the environment -- it's about pioneering speed in the future of automobiles. Along with this announcement, Rimac said it would separate the development, production and supply of battery systems, drivetrains and other EV components into a new entity owned by Rimac Group called Rimac Technology, which will work independently with other global car manufacturers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The fintech company Greenlight says that its app and debit card for kids is a financial literacy tool that gives parents "superpowers" to set strict controls on their children's spending. Parents can use the app to pay allowances, choose which stores the connected debit cards work at, set spending limits, and receive instant notifications whenever their child makes a purchase. But there's one thing Greenlight makes it very hard for parents to control: What the company does with the mountains of sensitive data it collects about children. Greenlight reserves the right to share that personal information -- including names, birth dates, email addresses, GPS location history, purchase history, and behavioral profiles -- with "ad and marketing vendors," "insurance companies," "collection agencies," and the catch-all category of "other service providers," according to its privacy policy. Greenlight's policy also says that it can use the data it collects to deliver "tailored content" advertisements, a kind of marketing that youth privacy and education advocates say is particularly manipulative and damaging for children.

The Atlanta-based company told Motherboard that, despite what parents must agree to when they sign up for the app, Greenlight doesn't "monetize or sell customer data in any way." In an email, a company spokesperson said Greenlight inserted those permissions into its privacy policy "in case we ever decide to offer merchant-funded offers to parents in the future based on aggregated and anonymous information." The permissions listed in the policy do not just apply to aggregated and anonymous information, however. They appear under sections titled "Personal Information We Collect and How," "How we Use Personal Information," and "How We Share Personal Information." They also do not only apply to parents, because by signing up for the service, parents must sign away the data rights of their children as well.

Microsoft has suspended its SQL Server on Windows Container beta "with immediate effect." The Register reports: The statement yesterday (early on a US public holiday) by Microsoft senior program manager Amit Khandelwal said: "Due to the existing ecosystem challenges and usage patterns we have decided to suspend the SQL Server on Windows Containers beta program for foreseeable future. Should the circumstances change, we will revisit the decision at appropriate time." Ecosystem challenges? Microsoft introduced Windows Server Containers in Windows Server 2016, enlisting the support of Docker so that developers could easily deploy containerised Windows applications in a similar manner to Linux. Windows containers are important to the company, used in its Application Guard security feature, which opens untrusted websites and Office documents in an isolated Hyper-V container. Containers were a key component of the abandoned Windows 10X.
[...]
The beta program for SQL Server on Windows containers began in 2017, said [Microsoft senior program manager Amit Khandelwal], which is a while back, and the fact that it has not hit general availability probably comes as no surprise to its relatively few users. That said, Microsoft has also decided to delete the Windows SQL Server images in the Docker Hub repository immediately, which did not go down well. "Could you please not delete those repos and images? That is going to break stuff. Folks have builds that depend on these images. At least give some warning rather than 'immediate effect,'" pleaded developer David Gardiner. Khandelwal replied saying that these container images were now three years old and "we do want any new users and customers downloading it." Since it was a beta, not supported in production, customers used it at their own risk.

In July 2019, Microsoft introduced an Early Adopters Program for SQL Server 2019 on Windows containers, the link for which leads appropriately to "Error 403 -- this web app is stopped." SQL Server running directly on Windows or in a Windows VM remains, of course, in rude health. Microsoft also recently introduced a preview of SQL Server for Azure Arc, supporting both Windows and Linux instances.

Dating app Bumble is opening up a restaurant in New York City where single folks can meet up for dates. Engadget reports: Bumble Brew is scheduled to open for breakfast service on July 24th. Lunch and dinner service will start at the Nolita spot in the coming weeks. Along with an 80-seat dining room, there will be a cocktail bar, patio dining and private dining space. The restaurant, which is decked out in the app's recognizable shade of yellow, can be used for events as well. It has an Italian-inspired menu with pickup and delivery options, and the music is primarily from female artists. The new venture builds on the Bumble Hive pop-up community spaces where people can hang out, eat and drink and meet others. Bumble Brew doesn't have a direct tie-in with the Bumble app, at least for now. Still, it's easy to imagine Bumble adding a reservation system that pops up when NYC users try to arrange a date.

The European Union has allocated $4.7 million in funding to upgrade Cerberus, a platform used by EU law enforcement agencies to crack passwords and access encrypted devices. From a report: Developed in 2019 for an initial cost of $2.7 million, Cerberus stands for Child Exploitation Response by Beating Encryption and Research to Unprotect Systems. The platform is a collection of finely tuned algorithms that utilize high-performance computers to crack passwords for devices seized during law enforcement investigations. Sources close to the project have told The Record this week that the new $4.7 million in funding will be used as part of a new project called Overclock, which aims to expand the Cerberus platform with new algorithms that can be used to crack passwords on a broader set of new devices. Once finished, EU law enforcement hopes to be able to expand their digital forensics capabilities in regards to extracting and recovering data from secure devices.

Russian government hackers breached the computer systems of the Republican National Committee last week, around the time a Russia-linked criminal group unleashed a massive ransomware attack, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing two people familiar with the matter. From the report: The government hackers were part of a group known as APT 29 or Cozy Bear, according to the people. That group has been tied to Russia's foreign intelligence service and has previously been accused of breaching the Democratic National Committee in 2016, and of carrying out a supply-chain cyberattack involving SolarWinds Corp., which infiltrated nine U.S. government agencies and was disclosed in December. It's not known what data the hackers viewed or stole, if anything. An RNC spokesman on Tuesday denied its systems were breached and referred to an earlier statement.

"Microsoft informed us that one of our vendors, Synnex, systems may have been exposed," Mike Reed, a spokesman for the RNC, said on Saturday. "There is no indication the RNC was hacked or any RNC information was stolen. We are investigating the matter and have informed DHS and the FBI." The attack on the RNC, coupled with the recent ransomware attack, is a major provocation to President Joe Biden, who warned Russian President Vladimir Putin about cyberattacks at a June 16 summit. It's not clear if the attack on the RNC is connected in any way to the ransomware attacks, which exploited multiple previously unknown vulnerabilities in software from Miami-based Kaseya Ltd.

President Joe Biden will direct the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to draft new rules aimed at stopping manufacturers from limiting consumers' ability to repair products at independent shops or on their own, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing a person familiar with the plan. From the report: While the agency will ultimately decide the size and scope of the order, the presidential right-to-repair directive is expected to mention mobile phone manufacturers and Department of Defense contractors as possible areas for regulation. Tech companies including Apple and Microsoft have imposed limits on who can repair broken consumer electronics like game consoles and mobile phones, which consumer advocates say increases repair costs. The order is also expected to benefit farmers, who face expensive repair costs from tractor manufacturers who use proprietary repair tools, software, and diagnostics to prevent third-parties from working on the equipment, according to the person, who requested anonymity to discuss the action ahead of its official announcement.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, a number of news outlets, including Slashdot, ran stories warning that the free and open-source audio editor Audacity may now be classified as spyware due to recent updates to its privacy policy. Ars Technica's Jim Salter looked into these claims and found that that is not the case. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from his report: FOSS-focused personal technology site SlashGear declares that although Audacity is free and open source, new owner Muse Group can "do some pretty damaging changes" -- specifically meaning its new privacy policy and telemetry features, described as "overarching and vague." FOSSPost goes even further, running the headline "Audacity is now a possible spyware, remove it ASAP." The root of both sites' concern is the privacy policy instigated by new Audacity owner Muse Group, who already published open source music notation tool MuseScore. The privacy policy, which was last updated on July 2, outlines the data which the app may collect [...]. The personal data being collected as outlined in the first five bullet points is not particularly broad -- in fact, it's quite similar to the collected data described in FOSSPost's own privacy policy: IP address, browser user-agent, "some other cookies your browser may provide us with," and (by way of WordPress and Google analytics) "your geographical location, cookies for other websites you visited or any other information your browser can give about you." This leaves the last row -- data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities' requests (if any)." While that's certainly a broad category and not particularly well-defined, it's also a fact of life in 2021. Whether a privacy policy says so or not, the odds are rather good that any given company will comply with legitimate law enforcement requests. If it doesn't, it won't likely be a company for long. The final grain of salt in the wound is a line stating that Audacity is "not intended for individuals below the age of 13" and requesting people under 13 years old "please do not use the App." This is an effort to avoid the added complexity and expense of dealing with laws regulating collection of personal data from children.

The first thing to point out is that neither the privacy policy nor the in-app telemetry in question are actually in effect yet -- both are targeted to an upcoming 3.0.3 release, while the most recent available version is 3.0.2. For now, that means there's absolutely no need for anyone to panic about their currently-installed version of Audacity. [...] Although FOSS-focused media outlets including FOSSPost and Slashgear reported negatively on this issue over the holiday weekend, the contributors and commenters active on the project's Github seem to have been largely satisfied by the May 13 update, which declared that Muse Group would self-host its telemetry sessions rather than using third-party libraries and hosting. The same day the second pull request went live, Github user Megaf said, "Good stuff. As long as the data is not going to [third party tech giants] we should be happy. Collect the data you really need, self-host it, make it private, make it opt-in, and we shall help." It's a small sample, but the sentiment seems broadly supported, with 66 positive and 12 negative reactions. Reaction to Megaf's comment reflects user reaction to the updated pull request itself, which currently has 606 positive and 29 explicitly negative reactions -- a marked improvement over the original pull request's 4,039 explicitly negative reactions and only 300 positive reactions. We believe that the user community got it right -- Muse Group appears to be taking the community's privacy concerns very seriously indeed, and its actual policies as stated appear to be reasonable.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Author Adam Silvera four years ago released the young adult science fiction novel "They Both Die at the End," which found success and landed a few weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. But years later in August 2020, Silvera said his publisher noticed a significant sales bump, the start of a trend that would send the book to the top of the New York Times' young adult paperback monthly bestseller list in April, where it still reigns. Silvera had no idea where the sales spike was coming from. "I kept commenting to my readers, 'Hey, don't know what's happening, but there's been a surge in sales lately, so grateful that everybody's finding the story years later,'" Silvera said. "And then that's when a reader was like, 'I'm seeing it on BookTok.' And I had no idea what they were talking about."

"BookTok" is a community of users on TikTok who post videos reviewing and recommending books, which has boomed in popularity over the past year. TikTok videos containing the hashtag #TheyBothDieAtTheEnd have collectively amassed more than 37 million views to date, many of which feature users reacting -- and often crying -- to the book's emotional ending. BookTok's impact on the book industry has been notable, helping new authors launch their careers and propelling books like Silvera's to the top of bestseller lists years after their original publication. Madeline Miller's "The Song of Achilles," E. Lockhart's "We Were Liars" and Taylor Jenkins Reid's "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" -- all of which were published before BookTok began to dominate the industry -- are among some of the other books that have found popularity on the app years after their initial release. Retailers like Barnes & Noble have taken advantage of BookTok's popularity to market titles popular on the app to customers by creating specialized shelves featuring books that have gone viral.