"An Air Force X-37B spaceplane just completed its 718th day in orbit, making it the longest mission yet for a secretive military test program," reports CNN: The US military has launched five uncrewed X-37B spaceplanes into orbit over the past decade, and each flight has been longer than its predecessor...

What is known is that the military is using the planes to develop reusable spaceflight technology. Officials don't necessarily want to reuse the same X-37B plane multiple times, but the Air Force designed the craft to try out new navigation systems as well as methods for reentering the Earth's atmosphere and for landing safely back on terra firma. The X-37B is also popular among space fans because of its unique design. The planes, which look like miniature space shuttles, launch into orbit atop powerful rockets and then break away to carry out their mission. When their duties are complete, they swoop back toward Earth and touch down horizontally on a runway, like a commercial airplane or space shuttle orbiter coming in for landing...

The current X-37B plane in orbit, called OTV-5, was launched to space in September 2017 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The previous flight, for OTV-4, was 718 days long and ended in May 2017.

"Businesses are waking up to the skills gamers can bring to the workplace," argues the BBC, adding that "Even the military is hiring gamers." "The ability to assimilate information, react swiftly and co-ordinate actions whilst remaining calm under pressure are often attributes of people that are good at gaming," a Royal Air Force spokesperson tells the BBC. Those skills are part of what the RAF is looking for "in a variety of roles. Skills acquired through gaming can be very relevant to certain areas."

"There are plenty of soft skills that gamers can utilise in a professional setting, such as teamwork, problem solving and strategic planning," says Ryan Gardner, a regional director with Hays recruitment.
They also interview the man who told Kotaku that "If you're playing EVE Online you basically already have an MBA." Matthew Ricci tells the BBC he stands by the sentiment -- and Eve players might understand why. Often made fun of in gaming circles as a "spreadsheet simulator", the economy of the fictional Eve universe is driven by real market principles. If you want to build a new spaceship, the raw material has to be mined by another player. Manufacturing costs come into effect, and commodities fluctuate in price based on demand and haulage distance.

Mr Ricci, who had always dreamed of being the boss of his own company, ran an in-game corporation comprising hundreds of players. Eventually, he realised he could transfer his skills to real-life business -- instead of doing it for free. He restructured Zentech, once a taxation vehicle for his father's business, and it is now in its fourth year helping international brands enter the Canadian market... He credits his success to his family, his obsession with running his own business -- and "a damn good company in Iceland that made a damn good game".
The BBC also spoke to a radiotherapy physicist who says old-school games like Palace of Magic, on his father's Acorn Electron [released in 1983] not only exposed him to computers, but encouraged a competitive streak which he believes translates to his work today. "When creating treatment plans, the aim is to optimise the radiation dose to the tumour and restrict it as much as possible to healthy surrounding tissue and organs... Most videogames are essentially puzzles to solve," he says. "And problem-solving is a big part of my job."

Inside Edition filmed a 10-minute segment with safety expert Steve Kardian to answer the question, "What Will Happen if You Try to Storm Area 51." More than 2 million people have marked themselves as "attending" a Facebook event called "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop Us" on Sept. 20. An additional 1.5 million people have expressed interest in attending, according to the page. But attendees should be prepared for an impenetrable Air Force facility, complete with guards armed with M4-type weapons, night-vision goggles and surface-to-air missiles, said Kardian, who's been in law enforcement for 33 years and has trained Navy SEALs and other military personnel.

"[Visitors are] going to have real trouble the minute they get within 100 yards of the facility," he said. Any closer, "you would likely be approached by a good number of individuals with guns pointed at you, with weaponry, screaming at you to get down on the ground...." Even if you did breach the perimeter and get past the armed guards, you would likely have to cross 50 miles before reaching anything top secret, Kardian said, and "the majority will not be visible from the ground."
Their report notes that the penalty for trespassing on a military base is 6 months in prison, a $500 fine, or both. But Vice reports that the joke Facebook event "has now spurred three supposedly real festivals over the weekend of September 20" -- Alienstock, Peacestock51, and Storm Area 51 Basecamp. "As was reported previously, the local population of Rachel, Nevada is not too thrilled about Alienstock.

In fact, the town's official web site now includes a complaint about "haphazard attempts" by the local bar to put together an event, adding "Locals are not kept in the loop and they certainly are not happy about this event that is likely to bring chaos to Rachel. "Law enforcement will be overwhelmed and local residents will step up to protect their property. It could get ugly. Please consider visiting our town another time."

An EFF analysis looks at the problems with some of Google's new "Privacy Sandbox" proposals, a few of which it calls "downright dangerous": Perhaps the most fleshed-out proposal in the Sandbox is the conversion measurement API. This is trying to tackle a problem as old as online ads: how can you know whether the people clicking on an ad ultimately buy the product it advertised....? Google's ID field can contain 64 bits of information -- a number between 1 and 18 quintillion. This will allow advertisers to attach a unique ID to each and every ad impression they serve, and, potentially, to connect ad conversions with individual users. If a user interacts with multiple ads from the same advertiser around the web, these IDs can help the advertiser build a profile of the user's browsing habits.

Even worse is Google's proposal for Federated Learning of Cohorts (or "FLoC").... FLoC would use Chrome users' browsing history to do clustering. At a high level, it will study browsing patterns and generate groups of similar users, then assign each user to a group (called a "flock"). At the end of the process, each browser will receive a "flock name" which identifies it as a certain kind of web user. In Google's proposal, users would then share their flock name, as an HTTP header, with everyone they interact with on the web. This is, in a word, bad for privacy. A flock name would essentially be a behavioral credit score: a tattoo on your digital forehead that gives a succinct summary of who you are, what you like, where you go, what you buy, and with whom you associate...

If the Privacy Sandbox won't actually help users, why is Google proposing all these changes? Google can probably see which way the wind is blowing. Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention and Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection have severely curtailed third-party trackers' access to data. Meanwhile, users and lawmakers continue to demand stronger privacy protections from Big Tech. While Chrome still dominates the browser market, Google might suspect that the days of unlimited access to third-party cookies are numbered. As a result, Google has apparently decided to defend its business model on two fronts. First, it's continuing to argue that third-party cookies are actually fine, and companies like Apple and Mozilla who would restrict trackers' access to user data will end up harming user privacy. This argument is absurd. But unfortunately, as long as Chrome remains the most popular browser in the world, Google will be able to single-handedly dictate whether cookies remain a viable option for tracking most users.

At the same time, Google seems to be hedging its bets. The "Privacy Sandbox" proposals for conversion measurement, FLoC, and PIGIN are each aimed at replacing one of the existing ways that third-party cookies are used for targeted ads. Google is brainstorming ways to continue serving targeted ads in a post-third-party-cookie world. If cookies go the way of the pop-up ad, Google's targeting business will continue as usual.

The Sandbox isn't about your privacy. It's about Google's bottom line. At the end of the day, Google is an advertising company that happens to make a browser.

Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: On PHPday in Verona (Italy) Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP, gave an enlightening talk on PHP and its history. 25 years of PHP (video of the talk) is ripe with details on PHP, the design choices behind the web's favorite server-side templating language and with explanations on why what you may think of as an inconsistent mess actually makes perfect sense just the way it is. Very insightful, fun, interesting and a must-watch for PHP lovers and haters alike.
Introducing one slide, Lerdorf remembers that in the 1990s, "the web looked like this -- CGI bins written in C."

But he also shows his first computers from the 1980s at the beginning of the talk, before moving on to screenshots of Gopher, and then of the Mosaic browser. "This changed everything. And not just for me, for everybody...

"Everybody around at the time, playing with this stuff, and having had UUCP addresses and playing with Usenet and bulletin boards -- it was very easy to see that this was going to change the world."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: For nearly 20 years," writes WIRED's Alex Davies in How Anthony Levandowski Put Himself at the Center of an Industry, "the French-American Levandowski has played a kind of purposeful Forrest Gump for the world of autonomous driving. Rather than stumbling into the center of one momentous event after another, Levandowski has put himself there. And he has left a mixed trail in his wake: Former colleagues have described him as brilliant, engaging, motivating, fast-charging, inconsiderate, a weasel, and just plain evil. None, though, deny that whether for good or ill, the benefit of society or himself, Levandowski has played a propulsive role in the development of self-driving tech."

But that's of little comfort to Levandowski, who was charged by the Feds earlier this week with stealing driverless-vehicle technology from Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo unit, prompting the New Yorker's Charles Duhigg to explain How the Anthony Levandowski Indictment Helps Big Tech Stifle Innovation in Silicon Valley. The Economic Espionage Act of 1996, Duhigg notes, "was mostly intended to be used against overseas saboteurs, but it has largely been directed at American citizens -- and, in effect, has made federal prosecutors into heavies operating on behalf of disgruntled tech firms."

The definition of a 'trade secret' in the statute, Duhigg adds, is so broad that it could very well mean anything. Daniel Olmos, an attorney who has represented individuals accused of stealing trade secrets, once told Duhigg, "I get calls all the time from scared engineers, who once put some work stuff on their home computer so they could work on it after dinner, and now they're worried if they try to jump to another firm they're gonna get sued. And you know what? They're right to be worried.

Wave723 shared this article from September's issue of IEEE Spectrum about an usual project by a leading group of cognitive biologists and computer scientists: Dubbed the Interspecies Internet, the project aims to provide intelligent animals such as elephants, dolphins, magpies, and great apes with a means to communicate among each other and with people online.

And through artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and other digital technologies, researchers hope to crack the code of all the chirps, yips, growls, and whistles that underpin animal communication.

Oh, and musician Peter Gabriel is involved. "We can use data analysis and technology tools to give non-humans a lot more choice and control," the former Genesis frontman, dressed in his signature Nehru-style collar shirt and loose, open waistcoat, told IEEE Spectrum at the inaugural Interspecies Internet Workshop, held [in July] in Cambridge, Mass. "This will be integral to changing our relationship with the natural world."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Contract workers at Google's office in Pittsburgh have just announced their intention to unionize. 66 percent of the eligible contractors at a company called HCL America Inc., signed cards seeking union representation, according to the United Steel Workers union. With the help of the Pittsburgh Association of Technical Professions (PATP), they're asking the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a vote on union representation. The PATP is a project sponsored by the union aimed at "helping Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania workers in high-tech fields organize and bargain collectively."

"Workers at HCL deserve far more than they have received in terms of compensation, transparency and consideration, and it has gone on like this for much too long," HCL worker Renata Nelson said in a press release. "While on-site management tries to do what they can, where they can, their hands are often tied by arbitrary corporate policy." The vote for union representation is an important step, necessary to empower a union to exclusively represent employees and negotiate on their behalf for a collective bargaining agreement. The move also represents an important step in the small but growing movement to unionize Silicon Valley's workforce. The press release explains that HCL's 90 employees "work side-by-side with those of the giant corporation for far less compensation and few, if any, of the perks."

After analyzing high-growth companies in the United States, a team of economists discovered that most superstar entrepreneurs are middle-aged. Their study is being published in the journal American Economic Review: Insights. The New York Times reports: The researchers looked at start-ups established between 2007 and 2014 and analyzed the top 0.1 percent -- defined as those with the fastest growth in employment and sales. The average age of those companies' founders was 45. There are, of course, famous counterexamples. Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he co-founded Facebook. Bill Gates was 19 when he founded Microsoft with Paul Allen. Steve Jobs was 21 when he founded Apple with Steve Wozniak. The origin stories of those companies and a handful of others helped to shape a myth that tech, and American innovation overall, is fueled by wunderkinds. But fresh-faced founders are the exception, not the rule, according to the study.

The new study was able to zero in on high-flying start-ups by bringing together anonymized data collected by different agencies within the federal government. The government matched sales and employment data for start-ups collected by the Census Bureau with information on the founders extracted from Internal Revenue Service filings. After stripping identifying information, the government provided the researchers with a data set including 2.7 million business founders. The researchers calculated that the founders' average age was 42. And for the founders of the 0.1 percent fastest-growing firms, the average age was 45. Firms that were successful enough to have an initial public offering or be acquired by a larger company showed the same pattern: Their founders were generally middle-aged.

Greg Nichols reporting for ZDNet: A company that makes propulsion systems for small satellites, Orbion Space Technology, has announced $9.2M in Series A funding. The round was led by Material Impact, a venture firm focused on translating early stage materials technologies into products and companies. Orbion has developed a very Star Trek-sounding technology that may prove to be a crucial component of an emerging New Space industry, the first-ever Hall-effect plasma thrusters for small satellites, dubbed the Aurora system. The company plans to use the capital from this round to support mass production of its thrusters.

Hall-effect plasma thrusters are a type of ion drive in which a propellant is accelerated by an electric field. The technology has been around since the 1960s, and Hall-effect thrusters were in use on Soviet satellites between 1972 and 1990. What's new is the size of the thrusters, as well as the size of the satellites they power, which are variously dubbed smallsats, microsatellites, or nanosatellites. As components and sensing technology has gotten smaller, and with the diversity of computing and sensing components available off-the-shelf, this new breed of satellite is cheap to build and lightweight, further reducing payload costs. That's opening up the possibility of launching communications and satellite arrays to companies and organizations that have never had that option.

Researchers report they've adapted CRISPR and combined it with other tools to cut and splice large genome fragments with ease. The study, conducted by researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, U.K., has been published in this week's issue of Science. Science Magazine reports: The tried and true tools of genetic engineering simply can't handle long stretches of DNA. Restriction enzymes, the standard tool for cutting DNA, can snip chunks of genetic material and join the ends to form small circular segments that can be moved out of one cell and into another. (Stretches of linear DNA don't survive long before other enzymes, called endonucleases, destroy them.) But the circles can accommodate at most a couple of hundred thousand bases, and synthetic biologists often want to move large segments of chromosomes containing multiple genes, which can be millions of bases long or more. "You can't get very large pieces of DNA in and out of cells," says Jason Chin, a synthetic biologist at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, U.K. What's more, those cutting and pasting tools can't be targeted precisely, and they leave unwanted DNA at the splicing sites -- the equivalent of genetic scars. The errors build up as more changes are made. Another problem is that traditional editing tools can't faithfully glue large segments together. These issues can be a deal-breaker when biologists want to make hundreds or thousands of changes to an organism's genome, says Chang Liu, a synthetic biologist at the University of California, Irvine.

Now, Chin and his MRC colleagues report they have solved these problems. First, the team adapted CRISPR to precisely excise long stretches of DNA without leaving scars. They then altered another well-known tool, an enzyme called lambda red recombinase, so it could glue the ends of the original chromosome -- minus the removed portion -- back together, as well as fuse the ends of the removed portion. Both circular strands of DNA are protected from endonucleases. The technique can create different circular chromosome pairs in other cells, and researchers can then swap chromosomes at will, eventually inserting whatever chunk they choose into the original genome. "Now, I can make a series of changes in one segment and then another and combine them together. That's a big deal," Liu says.

A municipal broadband service in Fort Collins, Colorado went live for new customers today, less than two years after the city's voters approved the network despite a cable industry-led campaign against it. Ars Technica reports: Fort Collins Connexion, the new fiber-to-the-home municipal option, costs $59.95 a month for 1Gbps download and 1Gbps upload speeds, with no data caps, contracts, or installation fees. There's a $15 monthly add-on fee to cover Wi-Fi, but customers can avoid that fee by purchasing their own router. Fort Collins Connexion also offers home phone service, and it plans to add TV service later on. Connexion is only available in a small portion of the city right now.

"The initial number of homes we're targeting this week is 20-30. We will notify new homes weekly, slowly ramping up in volume," Connexion spokesperson Erin Shanley told Ars. While Connexion's fiber lines currently pass just a small percentage of the city's homes and businesses, Shanley said the city's plan is to build out to the city limits within two or three years. "Ideally we will capture more than 50% of the market share, similar to Longmont," another Colorado city that built its own network, Shanley said. Beta testers at seven homes are already using the Fort Collins service, and the plan is to start notifying potential customers about service availability today. The city reportedly issued $143 million in bonds to finance the city-wide network. Fort Collins has a population of 165,000. The two residential internet packages that Connexion is offering are the $59.95 gigabit plan and 10Gbps plan for $299.95 a month. Shanley told Ars that "there are no taxes and fees on internet service," aside from the optional $15 charge to use city-provided Wi-Fi hardware instead of a customer-purchase router.

The broadband service also offers a gigabit Internet and phone service bundle for $74.90 a month. "Phone service on its own starts at $19.95 a month," adds Ars. "When TV service is available, there will be an Internet and TV bundle for $119.90 a month, and a bundle of all three services starts at $144.85."

Facebook and MIT are working on an AI assistant for Minecraft that can interact with players and then perform a bunch of tasks on request. "The assistant can also learn from these interactions, and develop new skills," reports CNET. "They chose to use the game Minecraft for the project because it has 'infinite variety' but simple and predictable rules." From the report: "The opportunities for an AI to learn are huge," the blog post said. "Facebook is setting itself the task of designing the AI to self-improve ... the researchers think the Minecraft environment is a perfect one to develop this kind of learning." MIT said it's a challenging process, because even a simple request like "build a tower 15 blocks tall" requires the AI assistant to understand what a tower is, how to build one, how to measure the height, and to know what 15 is. An early version of the AI assistant is already available to download. The paper detailing the project is available on ArXiv.org.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Foxit Software, the company behind the Foxit PDF reader app, said today that hackers breached its servers and have made off with some user information. ZDNet learned of the breach from a Foxit customer who shared a copy of the email the company is sending out to affected users, asking them to choose new passwords when logging in the next time.

According to this email, the security breach impacted the company's website, and, namely, information stored in the My Account section. Foxit web accounts are how the company manages its existing customers and is where users can access trial software, download purchased products, and access order histories. Foxit said hackers managed to access MyAccount data such as email addresses, passwords, real names, phone numbers, company names, and IP addresses from which users logged into their accounts. Due to the presence of IP addresses in the data hackers managed to access, this is believed to be a breach of Foxit's backend infrastructure, rather than a credential stuffing attack. The email did not mention if passwords were either hashed or salted. However, Foxit said it did invalidate all passwords for customers who it believed were impacted by the breach.

What's also unknown is when exactly the security incident took place. It could've happened this week, last month, or in previous years.

YouTube has agreed to pay more than $150 million to resolve U.S. allegations that it violated children's privacy laws. Bloomberg reports: The settlement with the Federal Trade Commission resolves a probe into whether the video service broke a law that makes it illegal to collect information on children under 13 and disclose it to others without parental permission. A group of activists last year asked the FTC to look into the matter. The settlement with the world's largest video service represents the most significant U.S. enforcement action against a big technology company in the past five years over practices involving minors.

The FTC has been cracking down on firms that violate the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). It fined the popular teen app now known as TikTok $5.7 million in February to resolve claims the video service failed to obtain parental consent before collecting names, email addresses and other information from children under 13. The YouTube settlement would be a record amount for a case involving COPPA. Some children's privacy advocates said the government hadn't gone far enough. "Once again, this FTC appears to have let a powerful company off the hook with a nominal fine for violating users' privacy online," Democratic U.S. Senator Ed Markey, a key figure behind the passage of COPPA, said in a statement. "We owe it to kids to come down hard on companies that infringe on children's' privacy and violate federal law."

The amount is "woefully low, considering the egregious nature of the violation, how much Google profited from violating the law, and given Google's size and revenue," said Katharina Kopp, deputy director of the Center for Digital Democracy, which helped lead the complaint against YouTube.

Huawei's next flagship smartphone will not come with Google's popular apps, such as Maps, YouTube, and Drive. The BBC reports: Google confirmed that due to a U.S. government ban on sales to Huawei, it could not license its apps to the Chinese smartphone giant. It also means the next Huawei phone will not have access to the Google Play app store, which could leave customers without access to other popular apps. The U.S. government restricted American companies from selling products and services to Huawei in May, citing national security concerns, which Huawei rejects.

Huawei is just weeks away from launching its next flagship phone, the Mate 30 Pro. It will be Huawei's first major phone launch since the U.S. restrictions were applied in May. But analysts say launching without Google's apps in Europe will be a major blow. Consumers expect to have access to all the major apps they are used to - including Maps and YouTube. Without them, Huawei's phones will seem a lot less appealing. And losing the Play Store means Huawei will need to provide another way for customers to access other popular apps such as Facebook, Twitter and BBC News. Huawei said in a statement: "Huawei will continue to use the Android OS and ecosystem if the U.S. government allows us to do so. Otherwise, we will continue to develop our own operating system and ecosystem."

Tom's Guide notes that consumers can still download apps from APK repositories like APKmirror.com. "While this is certainly a nuisance, it's far from crippling."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Last week, the Washington Post reported that the White House had been briefed on a plan to create an agency called HARPA, a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon's research and development arm DARPA. Among other initiatives, this new agency would reportedly collect volunteer data from a suite of smart devices, including Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echos, and Google Homes in order to identify "neurobehavioral signs" of "someone headed toward a violent explosive act." The project would then use artificial intelligence to create a "sensor suite" to flag mental changes that make violence more likely. According to the Post, the HARPA proposal was discussed with senior White House officials as early as June 2017, but has "gained momentum" after the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. The latest version of the plan, reportedly submitted to the Trump administration this month, outlined the biometric project called "SAFE HOME," an acronym for "Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes." A source told the newspaper that every time HARPA has been discussed in the White House "even up to the presidential level, it's been very well-received."

A copy of the plan obtained by the Post characterizes HARPA as pursuing "breakthrough technologies with high specificity and sensitivity for early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence" and claims that "a multi-modality solution, along with real-time data analytics, is needed to achieve such an accurate diagnosis." That's a lot of vague buzzwords, but the general idea is clear: collect a wealth of personal data in order to flag mental status changes in individuals and determine whether those changes can predict mass violence. It's an approach that strikes George David Annas, deputy director of the Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship Program at SUNY Upstate Medical University, as ridiculous. "The proposed data collection goes beyond absurdity when they mention the desire to collect FitBit data," Annas told Gizmodo. "I am unaware of any study linking walking too much and committing mass murder. As for the other technologies, what are these people expecting? 'Alexa, tell me the best way to kill a lot of people really quickly'? Really?" "Creating a watchlist of citizens who most likely will never act violently based on their mental health is a very dangerous proposal with major ethical considerations," Emma Fridel, a doctoral candidate at Northeastern University specializing in mass murder, told Gizmodo. "Doing so to predict the unpredictable is utterly absurd."

As promised, popular RSS reader NetNewsWire, which changed ownership last year, has released v5.0. From a blog post: NetNewsWire 5.0 is shipping! In case you haven't been following along until just now: NetNewsWire is an open source RSS reader for Mac. It's free! You can just download it and use it. No strings. It's designed to be stable, fast, and free of bugs. It doesn't have a lot of features yet, and that's because we prioritized quality over features. We will be adding more features, of course, but not quickly. We're also working on an iOS app.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the world of mixed reality hardware and software, few people have the expert-level credibility of Oculus CTO John Carmack, whose pioneering 3D work at id Software broke new ground on personal computers years before he turned his attention to bringing VR hardware to life. While Oculus' owner, Facebook, recently suggested that the future of its Insight and Guardian motion-tracking technologies is in all-day wearable augmented reality glasses, Carmack is underscoring that this future isn't immediately on the horizon, and that other companies in the space -- particularly Magic Leap -- have been underdelivering on their early hype.

The core issue, Carmack said on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, is that technology still hasn't advanced to the point where AR glasses can be made small enough for people to wear around all day. Right now, he says, Oculus could make a "sort of a shoebox-sized thing" that people could wear into the world, but it wouldn't be socially acceptable in most places. Even if Oculus could cut the size down by three quarters into a swim goggle-sized wearable, he doesn't believe that people would want to wear it for long periods, and "we haven't built it," he notes. Carmack also struggled to define realistic consumer applications for the technology, noting that he was "skeptical of the broad utility" of a lot of the "little demos" that initially seem interesting.

The city of Miami has notified a number of companies that they must remove their fleets of electric scooters from the streets in preparation for Hurricane Dorian, lest the devices become flying projectiles. From a report: Officials told the six companies that operate fleets in the city -- Bird, Bolt, Uber's Jump, Lime, Lyft and Spin -- to clear out their scooters by noon on Friday. The order is meant to prevent any potential hazards that could arise from the scooters being left out during the storm, including fears that the vehicles could be swept up in the storm's dangerous winds.

A number of scooter companies said they've also removed or reduced their fleets in Fort Lauderdale, Tampa and Orlando, which are also expected to be in the path of the storm. Hurricane Dorian, currently a strong Category 2 storm, is forecast to become a Category 4 storm with potentially "devastating hurricane-force winds," the National Hurricane Center said on Friday.