New submitter Synonymous Homonym writes: This year's USENIX ATC will be the last, but other USENIX conferences will keep happening.

Since USENIX's inception in 1975, it has been a key gathering place for innovators in the advanced computing systems community. The early days of meetings evolved into the two annual conferences, the USENIX Summer and Winter Conferences, which in 1995 merged into the single Annual Technical Conference that has continued to evolve and serve thousands of our constituents for 30 years.

USENIX recognizes the pivotal role that USENIX ATC has played in the shaping of the Association itself as well as the lives and careers of its many attendees and members. We also realize that change is inevitable, and all good things must come to an end:

The last ATC will include both a celebration of USENIX's 50th anniversary on the evening of Monday, July 7, and a tribute to USENIX ATC on the evening of Tuesday, July 8.

An anonymous reader shares a report: During the Android Show leading up to Google I/O, Google on Tuesday offered a brief update on the adoption of the RCS (Rich Communication Services) protocol, an upgrade to SMS that offers high-resolution photos and videos, typing indicators, read receipts, improved group chat, and more. The company shared that the messaging standard now supports over a billion messages per day in the U.S.

This metric is based on an average of the last 28 days, Google noted. The stat is notable because Google fought for years to get Apple to adopt support for RCS on iOS, allowing for better communication between Android and Apple devices. Previously, iPhone users who received texts from friends on Android had to deal with blurry videos and images, and couldn't as easily manage group chats when their green-bubbled friends joined. Unlike with iMessage, group chats with Android users couldn't be renamed, nor could people be added or removed, and you couldn't exit when you wanted. Emoji reactions also didn't work properly, leading to annoying texts to let you know how an Android user reacted, instead of just displaying their emoji reaction directly.

The Department of Commerce officially rescinded the Biden administration's Artificial Intelligence Diffusion Rule on Tuesday, just days before its May 15 implementation date. The rule would have imposed first-ever export restrictions on U.S.-made AI chips to dozens of countries while tightening existing controls on China and Russia.

Instead of implementing blanket restrictions, the DOC signaled a shift toward direct country-by-country negotiations. The department released interim guidance reminding companies that using Huawei's Ascend AI chips anywhere violates U.S. export rules and warned about consequences of allowing U.S. chips to train AI models in China. Commerce Secretary for Industry and Security Jeffery Kessler criticized the previous administration's approach, calling it "ill-conceived and counterproductive."

The United States and China said Monday they reached an agreement to temporarily reduce the tariffs [non-paywalled source] they have imposed on each other in an attempt to defuse the trade war threatening the world's two largest economies. From a report: In a joint statement, the countries said they would suspend their respective tariffs for 90 days while they negotiate. Under the agreement, the United States would reduce the tariff on Chinese imports to 30 percent from its current 145 percent, while China would lower its import duty on American goods to 10 percent from 125 percent.

"We concluded that we have a shared interest," said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at a news conference in Geneva where U.S. and Chinese officials met over the weekend. "The consensus from both delegations is that neither side wanted a decoupling," he said. The agreement breaks an impasse that had brought trade between China and the United States to a halt. Many American businesses had suspended orders, holding out hope that the two countries could strike a deal to bring down the tariff rates while raising the spectre of price increases.

18 years ago Slashdot covered the creation of Spaceport America.

Today Space.com hails it as "the first purpose-built commercial spaceport in the world." But engineer/executive director Scott McLaughlin has plans to grow even more. Already home to an array of commercial space industry tenants, such as Virgin Galactic, SpinLaunch, Up Aerospace, and Prismatic, Spaceport America is a "rocket-friendly environment of 6,000 square miles of restricted airspace, low population density, a 12,000-foot by 200-foot runway, vertical launch complexes, and about 340 days of sunshine and low humidity," the organization boasts on its website...

Space.com: What changes do you see that make Spaceport America even more viable today?

McLaughlin: I think opening ourselves up to doing different kinds of work. We're more like a civilian test range now. We've got high-altitude UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles]. We're willing to do engine production. We believe we're about to sign a data center, one that's able to provide services to our customers who want low-latency, artificial intelligence, or high-powered computing. You'll be able to rent some virtual machines and do your own thing and have it be instantaneous at the spaceport. So I think being more broadminded about what we can do at the spaceport is helping generate customers and revenue...

Our goal is to see Virgin Galactic fly in a year or so, hopefully flying twice a week, and that will have a big impact on the spaceport... [W]e're trying to be open-minded as we're partnered with White Sands Missile Range to use that airspace. We're even looking at things like an electromagnetic pulse facility. It's a customer that I can't identify yet... We are working on a "reentry" license too. We recently discussed this with specialists and we think we have a site relatively close to the spaceport that's flat and free of mesquite bushes and such, so we can do capsule return and other types of return. And of course we have the runway. So I'd think we'd be the only spaceport that does vertical and horizontal launch and reentry....

We're never going to have the throughput that the Cape in Florida has. But we'll be a good alternative especially if you're going to do a small to medium-sized launch, and you need to do it quickly, and perhaps do it more securely than you would if you were to fly over water. That's why the Department of Defense is showing interest in the inland spaceport.

Whoop fitness trackers had promised free upgrades to anyone who'd been a member for at least six months — and then reneged. "After customers began complaining, the company responded with a Reddit post, according to a report from TechCrunch: Now, anyone with more than 12 months remaining on their subscription is eligible for a free upgrade to Whoop 5.0 (or a refund if they've already paid the fee). And customers with less than 12 months can extend their subscription to get the upgrade at no additional cost.
Whoop acknowledged that they'd previously said anyone who'd been a member for six months would receive a free upgrade. Friday they described that blog article as "incorrect". ("This was never our policy and should never have been posted... We removed that blog article... We're sorry for any confusion this may have caused.")

TechCrunch explains: While the company said it's making these changes because it "heard your feedback," it also suggested that its apparent stinginess was tied to its transition from a [2021] model focused on monthly or six-month subscription plans to one where it only offers 12- and 24-month subscriptions...

There's been a mixed response to these changes on the Whoop subreddit, with one moderator describing it as a "win for the community." Other posters were more skeptical, with one writing, "You don't publish a policy by accident and keep it up for years. Removing it after backlash doesn't erase the fact [that] it is real."
Other changes announced by Whoop:

• "If you purchased or renewed a WHOOP 4.0 membership in the last 30 days before May 8, your upgrade fee will be automatically waived at checkout..."

• "If you've already upgraded to WHOOP 5.0 on Peak and paid a one-time upgrade fee despite having more than 12 months remaining, we'll refund that fee."

"Thank you for your feedback. We remain committed to delivering the best technology, experience, and value to our community."

"A China-linked unnamed threat actor dubbed Chaya_004 has been observed exploiting a recently disclosed security flaw in SAP NetWeaver," reports The Hacker News: Forescout Vedere Labs, in a report published Thursday, said it uncovered a malicious infrastructure likely associated with the hacking group weaponizing CVE-2025-31324 (CVSS score: 10.0) since April 29, 2025. CVE-2025-31324 refers to a critical SAP NetWeaver flaw that allows attackers to achieve remote code execution (RCE) by uploading web shells through a susceptible "/developmentserver/metadatauploader" endpoint.

The vulnerability was first flagged by ReliaQuest late last month when it found the shortcoming being abused in real-world attacks by unknown threat actors to drop web shells and the Brute Ratel C4 post-exploitation framework. According to [SAP cybersecurity firm] Onapsis, hundreds of SAP systems globally have fallen victim to attacks spanning industries and geographies, including energy and utilities, manufacturing, media and entertainment, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, retail, and government organizations. Onapsis said it observed reconnaissance activity that involved "testing with specific payloads against this vulnerability" against its honeypots as far back as January 20, 2025. Successful compromises in deploying web shells were observed between March 14 and March 31.
"In recent days, multiple threat actors are said to have jumped aboard the exploitation bandwagon to opportunistically target vulnerable systems to deploy web shells and even mine cryptocurrency..."



Thanks to Slashdot reader bleedingobvious for sharing the news.

Back in 2000, Slashdot founder CmdrTaco marked the 4th anniversary of Jennifer Ringley's pioneering "JenniCam" livestream (saying "It sure beats the Netscape FishCam. It's nuts how Jenni's little cam became such a fixture on The Internet...")

But a new article in the Washington Post remembers how "Once, Ringley looked directly into the camera and held a note in front of her eye. It read: 'I FEEL SO LONELY.'" By 2003, Ringley had shut down the site and disappeared. She began declining interview requests, saying she was enjoying her privacy; her absence on social media continues to this day.
"But by then, the human zoo was everywhere," they write including "social media, where everyone could become a character in their own show." In 2007 Justin Kan launched Justin.TV, which eventually became Twitch, "a thrumming online city for anyone wanting to, as its slogan said, 'waste time watching other people waste time.'"

But the article also notes 2023 stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey that found Americans"were spending far less time socializing than they had 20 years ago — especially 18-to-29-year-olds, who were spending two more hours a day alone." So how did this play out for the next generation of livestreaming influencers? Here's the origin story of "a lonely young woman in Texas" who's "streamed every second of her life for three years and counting." One afternoon, her boyfriend told her to try Twitch, saying, as she recalled: "Your life sucks, you work at CVS, you have no friends. ... This could be helpful." In her first stream, on a Friday night, she played 3½ hours of "World of Warcraft" for her zero followers.
Eight years later... Six hundred and forty-two people are watching when Emily tugs off her sleep mask to begin day No. 1,137 of broadcasting every hour of her life... On the live-streaming service Twitch, one of the world's most popular platforms, Emily is a legendary figure. For three years, she has ceaselessly broadcast her life — every birthday and holiday, every sickness and sleepless night, almost all of it alone. Her commitment has made her a model for success in the new internet economy, where authenticity and endurance are highly prized. It's also made her a good amount of money: $5.99 a month from thousands of subscribers each, plus donations and tips — minus Twitch's 30-to-40 percent cut.

But to get there, Emily, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that her last name be withheld due to concerns of harassment, has devoted herself to a solitary life of almost constant stimulation. For three years, she has taken no sick days, gone on no vacations, declined every wedding invitation, had no sex. She has broadcast and self-narrated a thousand days of sleeping, driving and crying, lugging her camera backpack through the grocery store, talking through a screen to strangers she'll never meet. Her goal is to buy a house and get married by the age of 30, but she's 28 and says she's too busy to have a boyfriend. Her last date was seven years ago... But no one tells streamers when to record or when to stop. There are no labor codes, performance limits or regulations to keep the platforms from setting incentives impossibly high. Many streamers figure out the optimal strategy themselves: The more you share, the more successful you can be....

Though some Twitch stars are millionaires, most scramble to get by, buffeted by the vagaries of audience attention. Emily's paid-subscription count, which peaked last year at 22,000, has since slumped to around 6,000, dropping her base income to about $5,000 a month, according to estimates from the analytics firm Streams Charts... Sometimes Emily dreads waking up and clocking into the reality show that is her life. She knows staring at screens all night is unhealthy, and when she feels too depressed to stream, she'll stay in bed for hours while her viewers watch. But she worries that taking a break would be "career suicide," as she called it. Some viewers already complain that she showers too long, sleeps in too late, doesn't have enough fun...

She said she "used to show true sadness on stream" but doesn't anymore because it makes viewers uncomfortable. When she hits a breaking point now, she said, she closes herself in the bathroom.

Inspired by researchers who'd bribed people to use Microsoft's Bing for two weeks (and found some wanted to keep using it), a Washington Post tech columnist also tried it — and reported it "felt like quitting coffee."

"The first few days, I was jittery. I kept double searching on Google and DuckDuckGo, the non-Google web search engine I was using, to check if Google gave me better results. Sometimes it did. Mostly it didn't."

"More than two weeks into a test of whether I love Google search or if it's just a habit, I've stopped double checking. I don't have Google FOMO..." I didn't do a fancy analysis into whether my search results were better with Google or DuckDuckGo, whose technology is partly powered by Bing. The researchers found our assessment of search quality is based on vibes. And the vibes with DuckDuckGo are perfectly fine. Many dozens of readers told me about their own satisfaction with non-Google searches...

For better or worse, DuckDuckGo is becoming a bit more Google-like. Like Google, it has ads that are sometimes misleading or irrelevant. DuckDuckGo and Bing also are mimicking Google's makeover from a place that mostly pointed you to the best links online to one that never wants you to leave Google... [DuckDuckGo] shows you answers to things like sports results and AI-assisted replies, though less often than Google does. (You can turn off AI "instant answers" in DuckDuckGo.) Answers at the top of search results pages can be handy — assuming they're not wrong or scams — but they have potential trade-offs. If you stop your search without clicking to read a website about sports news or gluten intolerance, those sites could die. And the web gets worse. DuckDuckGo says that people expect instant answers from search results, and it's trying to balance those demands with keeping the web healthy. Google says AI answers help people feel more satisfied with their search results and web surfing.

DuckDuckGo has one clear advantage over Google: It collects far less of your data. DuckDuckGo doesn't save what I search...

My biggest wariness from this search experiment is like the challenge of slowing climate change: Your choices matter, but maybe not that much. Our technology has been steered by a handful of giant technology companies, and it's difficult for individuals to alter that. The judge in the company's search monopoly case said Google broke the law by making it harder for you to use anything other than Google. Its search is so dominant that companies stopped trying hard to out-innovate and win you over. (AI could upend Google search. We'll see....) Despite those challenges, using Google a bit less and smaller alternatives more can make a difference. You don't have to 100 percent quit Google.
"Your experiment confirms what we've said all along," Google responded to the Washington Post. "It's easy to find and use the search engine of your choice."

Although the Post's reporter also adds that "I'm definitely not ditching other company internet services like Google Maps, Google Photos and Gmail." They write later that " You'll have to pry YouTube out of my cold, dead hands" and "When I moved years of emails from Gmail to Proton Mail, that switch didn't stick."

Just days after a radar and communications outage at Newark Liberty International Airport, the FAA confirmed a second incident on May 9 that disrupted radar and radio contact for 90 seconds due to a telecom failure at Philadelphia TRACON. "As of 12:30PM ET, FlightAware stats showed 292 total delays for flights into or out of Newark, which is also experiencing delays due to runway construction," reports The Verge. From the report: After the first outage on April 28th, an air traffic controller who had been on duty that day told CNN it "...was the most dangerous situation you could have." CNN reports that after a change made last July, the airport's radar and radio communication flows over a single data feed from a facility in New York, where controllers used to manage Newark's flights, to Philadelphia.

The FAA has announced a plan to replace the current copper connection with fiber, as well as adding "three new, high-bandwidth telecommunications connections between the New York-based STARS and the Philadelphia TRACON," and more air traffic controllers. Until those and other changes are made, the agency also said a new backup system is being deployed in Philadelphia, but it's unclear when that will be available.

NBC News reports the Friday outage affected a limited number of sectors, but it's another incident in the string of issues that have highlighted the problems with the airport's aging control system and lack of staffing. [...] A statement from the FAA said, "Frequent equipment and telecommunications outages can be stressful for controllers. Some controllers at the Philadelphia TRACON who work Newark arrivals and departures have taken time off to recover from the stress of multiple recent outages."

According to Bloomberg, the Trump administration plans to revise a set of chip trade restrictions called the "AI diffusion" rule, which were scheduled to take effect on May 15. CNBC reports: The rule, which was proposed in the last days of the Biden administration, organizes countries into three different tiers, all of which have different restrictions on whether advanced AI chips like those made by Nvidia, AMD, and Intel can be shipped to the country without a license.

Chipmakers including Nvidia and AMD have been against the rule. AMD CEO Lisa Su told CNBC on Wednesday that the U.S. should strike a balance between restricting access to chips for national security and providing access, which will boost the American chip industry. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said earlier this week that being locked out of the Chinese AI market would be a "tremendous loss."

Reddit's Steve Huffman isn't mincing words about what he found when he came back as CEO in 2015: a company full of idealists who weren't exactly killing themselves with hard work.

"We were really idealistic, and that's been good in many ways, but we were also idealistic about not being a business," Huffman said on the "Prof G Pod" podcast. "Wrapped up in some of that idealism was also not working very hard," he added.

Huffman sees this as a Silicon Valley disease: "It's almost an entitlement of, 'I work at these companies, but I don't have to work very hard and I'm here for myself.'"

As May the 4th transforms into Star Wars Day, dozens of sites and games have found ways to celebrate. The official Star Wars channel on YouTube released a celebratory video. Disney+ released Tales of the Underworld , a six-part animated series about bounty hunters during the reign of the Empire. And Friday the first two episodes began streaming in Fortnite in a special early premiere on "Star Wars Watch Party island," according to IGN. (Disney acquired a $1.5 billion stake in Epic in March 2024, they note, "positioning itself to collaborate with the game developer for many years to come." One example from StarWars.com: Introducing the GALACTIC BATTLE Season: the largest crossover yet between Fortnite Battle Royale and Star Wars. Strap into a TIE fighter or X-wing and take to the skies over new locations like the First Order Base where you can take on Captain Phasma and her legion of stormtroopers. Players can expect new gameplay updates to drop every week throughout the season, including new weapons, Force Abilities and quests to complete.
- There's additional Star Wars celebrations today in several other games, including LEGO Fortnite Brick Life, Rocket League, and Monopoly GO!

- CNN is publishing its own list of Star Wars day products and deals. (Including Panasonic's Stormtrooper electric shaver and the Darth Vader toaster.)

- There's special Star Wars pages at Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Lego.

- On X.com the UK's national library posted what looks a picture of a medieval manuscript with Yoda painted into the text. Someone posted a clip from the 1977 Bob Hope Christmas Special which ends with Mark Hamill rescuing Princess Leia (played by Olivia Newton-John). Even the White House has posted an AI-generated image of president Trump wielding a lightsaber.

- Starbucks even has its own line of Star Wars-themed mugs.

And if today isn't enough, the Austin American-Statesman reminds readers that there's more Star Wars celebrations are coming up: Sometimes also known as Geek Pride Day, May 25 is known as "Star Wars Day" because it marks the release of the anniversary of the series' debut. "A New Hope" premiered in United States theaters on May 25, 1997...

May 21 is Talk Like Yoda Day, an annual celebration marking the release of "Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back" on May 21, 1980 — the film that introduced Yoda to the galaxy...

"Our future won't be handed to us," says the young narrator in a new ad from the nonprofit Code.org. "We will build it."

"But how can we when the education we need is still just an elective?" says another young voice...

The ad goes on to tout the power "to create with computer science and AI — the skills transforming every industry..." and ends by saying "This isn't radical. It's what education is supposed to do. Make computer science and AI a graduation requirement."

There's also a hard-hitting new web site, which urges people to sign a letter of support (already signed by executives from top tech companies including Microsoft, Dropbox, AMD, Meta, Blue Origin, and Palantir — and by Steve Ballmer, who is listed as the chairman of the L.A. Clippers basketball team).

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp says the letter ran in the New York Times, while this campaign will officially kick off Monday... Code.org teased the new Unlock8 campaign last month on social media as it celebrated a new Executive Order that makes K–12 AI literacy a U.S. priority, which it called a big win for CS & AI education, adding, "We've been building to this moment."

The move to make CS and AI a graduation requirement is a marked reversal of Code.org's early days, when it offered Congressional testimony on behalf of itself and tech-led Computing in the Core reassuring lawmakers that: "Making computer science courses 'count' would not require schools to offer computer science or students to study it; it would simply allow existing computer science courses to satisfy a requirement that already exists."

Threads has now grown to over 350 million monthly active users, reports TechCrunch, citing Mark Zuckerberg's comments on a company earnings call. That means Threads grew by 9.4% in roughly 90 days: That's an increase of 30 million users since the prior quarter, where Meta reported that Threads had 320 million users. The new figure represents increased growth, as Threads added 30 million in the first quarter of this year, compared with 20 million in Q4 2024.

It's also worth noting that in a single quarter, Threads added nearly the same number of users to its network as one of its newer competitors, Bluesky. The latter, a decentralized social app, today has roughly 35 million users.
Zuckerberg also said there's been a 35% increase in time spent on Threads, according to the article, as a result of improvements to its recommendations systems.

NASA's SPHEREx space observatory has officially begun its two-year mission to map the entire sky in 102 infrared wavelengths, capturing about 3,600 images daily to create 3D maps of hundreds of millions of galaxies. Its goal is to unlock new insights into cosmic inflation, the origins of galaxies, and the building blocks of life in the Milky Way by using spectroscopy to analyze light and matter across the universe. From a press release: From its perch in Earth orbit, SPHEREx peers into the darkness, pointing away from the planet and the Sun. The observatory will complete more than 11,000 orbits over its 25 months of planned survey operations, circling Earth about 14.5 times a day. It orbits Earth from north to south, passing over the poles, and each day it takes images along one circular strip of the sky. As the days pass and the planet moves around the Sun, SPHEREx's field of view shifts as well so that after six months, the observatory will have looked out into space in every direction.

When SPHEREx takes a picture of the sky, the light is sent to six detectors that each produces a unique image capturing different wavelengths of light. These groups of six images are called an exposure, and SPHEREx takes about 600 exposures per day. When it's done with one exposure, the whole observatory shifts position -- the mirrors and detectors don't move as they do on some other telescopes. Rather than using thrusters, SPHEREx relies on a system of reaction wheels, which spin inside the spacecraft to control its orientation.

Hundreds of thousands of SPHEREx's images will be digitally woven together to create four all-sky maps in two years. By mapping the entire sky, the mission will provide new insights about what happened in the first fraction of a second after the big bang. In that brief instant, an event called cosmic inflation caused the universe to expand a trillion-trillionfold.

Nvidia publicly criticized AI startup Anthropic on Thursday over claims about Chinese smuggling tactics, just days before the Biden-era "AI Diffusion Rule" takes effect on May 15. The confrontation highlights growing tensions between AI hardware providers and model developers over export controls.

"American firms should focus on innovation and rise to the challenge, rather than tell tall tales that large, heavy, and sensitive electronics are somehow smuggled in 'baby bumps' or 'alongside live lobsters,'" an Nvidia spokesperson said, responding to Anthropic's Wednesday blog post.

The Amazon and Google-backed AI startup had called for tighter restrictions and enforcement, arguing that "maintaining America's compute advantage through export controls is essential for national security." Anthropic specifically proposed lowering export thresholds for Tier 2 countries to prevent China from gaining ground in AI development.

Nvidia countered that policy shouldn't be used to limit competitiveness: "China, with half of the world's AI researchers, has highly capable AI experts at every layer of the AI stack. America cannot manipulate regulators to capture victory in AI."

Meta has eliminated key privacy protections for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses users in a policy update that took effect April 29th. The company now permanently enables Meta AI with camera functionality unless "Hey Meta" voice commands are completely disabled, while simultaneously removing users' ability to opt out of having their voice recordings stored in the cloud.

These recordings are kept for up to a year for Meta's product development, with the company only deleting accidental voice interactions after 90 days. Users can manually delete individual recordings but cannot prevent the initial collection.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Raspberry Pi boards have a combination of surface-mount devices (SMDs) and through-hole bits. SMDs allow for far more tiny chips, resistors, and other bits to be attached to boards by their tiny pins, flat contacts, solder balls, or other connections. For those things that are bigger, or subject to rough forces like clumsy human hands, through-hole soldering is still required, with leads poked through a connective hole and solder applied to connect and join them securely. The Raspberry Pi board has a 40-pin GPIO header on it that needs through-hole soldering, along with bits like the Ethernet and USB ports. These require robust solder joints, which can't be done the same way as with SMT (surface-mount technology) tools. "In the early days of Raspberry Pi, these parts were inserted by hand, and later by robotic placement," writes Roger Thornton, director of applications for Raspberry Pi, in a blog post. The boards then had to go through a follow-up wave soldering step.

Now Pi boards have their tiny bits and bigger pieces soldered at the same time through an intrusive reflow soldering process undertaken with Raspberry Pi's UK manufacturing partner, Sony. After adjusting component placement, the solder stencil, and the connectors, the board makers could then place and secure all their components in the same stage. Intrusive reflow soldering this way involves putting solder paste on both the pads for SMD bits and into the through-hole pins. The through-hole parts are pushed onto the paste, and the whole board then goes into a reflow oven, where the solder paste melts, the connectors fall in more fully, and joints are formed for all the SMD and through-hole parts at once. You can watch the process up close in this mesmerizing video from Surface Mount Process.

Intrusive reflow soldering is not a brand-new process, but what it did for the Raspberry Pi is notable, according to Thornton. The company saw "a massive 50% reduction in product returns," and it sped up production by 15 percent by eliminating the break between the two soldering stages. By removing the distinct soldering bath from its production line, the company also reduced its carbon dioxide output by 43 tonnes per year (or 47.4 US tons).

Kosmos 482, a failed Soviet Venus probe, is expected to make an uncontrolled reentry in mid-May after orbiting Earth for 53 years. Gizmodo reports: The lander module from an old Soviet spacecraft is expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere during the second week of May, according to Marco Langbroek, a satellite tracker based in Leiden, the Netherlands. "As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact," Langbroek wrote in a blog update. "The risks involved are not particularly high, but not zero."

Kosmos 482 launched on March 31, 1972 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in Kazakhstan. The mission was an attempt by the Soviet space program to reach Venus, but it failed to gain enough velocity to enter a transfer trajectory toward the scorching-hot planet. A malfunction resulted in an engine burn that wasn't sufficient to reach Venus' orbit and left the spacecraft in an elliptical Earth orbit, according to NASA. The spacecraft broke apart into four different pieces, with two of the smaller fragments reentering over Ashburton, New Zealand, two days after launch. Meanwhile, two remaining pieces, believed to be the payload and the detached upper-stage engine unit, entered a higher orbit measuring 130 by 6,089 miles (210 by 9,800 kilometers).

The failed mission consisted of a carrier bus and a lander probe, which together form a spherical pressure vessel weighing more than 1,000 pounds (495 kilograms). Considering its mass, "risks are similar to that of a meteorite impact," Langbroek wrote. As of now, it's hard to determine exactly when the spacecraft will reenter. Langbroek estimates that the reentry will take place on May 10, but a more precise date will get clearer as the reentry date nears.