ChatGPT, the wildly popular AI chatbot launched in November, saw monthly traffic to its website and unique visitors decline for the first time ever in June, according to analytics firm Similarweb. From a report: Worldwide desktop and mobile traffic to the ChatGPT website decreased by 9.7% in June from May, while unique visitors to ChatGPT's website dropped 5.7%. The amount of time visitors spent on the website was also down 8.5%, Similarweb data shows.

ChatGPT set off a frenzied use of generative AI in daily tasks from writing to coding and reached 100 million monthly active users in January, two months after its launch. It is the fastest-growing consumer application ever, and now boasts over 1.5 billion monthly visits, one of the top 20 websites in the world. For instance, ChatGPT has far surpassed Bing, the search engine run by Microsoft which uses OpenAI's technology.

"The European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope launched at 11:12 a.m. ET Saturday," reports CNN, "aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

CNN is calling it "a mission designed to unravel some of the greatest mysteries of the universe." The 1.2-meter-diameter (4-foot-diameter) telescope has set off on a monthlong journey to its orbital destination of the sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, which is nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away from Earth and also home to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope... After arriving at orbit, Euclid will spend two months testing and calibrating its instruments — a visible light camera and a near-infrared camera/spectrometer — before surveying one-third of the sky for the next six years. Euclid's primary goal is to observe the "dark side" of the universe, including dark matter and dark energy. While dark matter has never actually been detected, it is believed to make up 85% of the total matter in the universe. Meanwhile, dark energy is a mysterious force thought to play a role in the accelerating expansion of the universe.

In the 1920s, astronomers Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe has been expanding since its birth 13.8 billion years ago. But research that began in the 1990s has shown that something sparked an acceleration of the universe's expansion about 6 billion years ago, and the cause remains a mystery. Unlocking the true nature of dark energy and dark matter could help astronomers understand what the universe is made of, how its expansion has changed over time, and if there is more to understanding gravity than meets the eye... Euclid is designed to create the largest and most accurate three-dimensional map of the universe, observing billions of galaxies that stretch 10 billion light-years away to reveal how matter may have been stretched and pulled apart by dark energy over time. These observations will effectively allow Euclid to see how the universe has evolved over the past 10 billion years...

The telescope's image quality will be four times sharper than those of ground-based sky surveys. Euclid's wide perspective can also record data from a part of the sky 100 times bigger than what Webb's camera can capture. During its observations, the telescope will create a catalog of 1.5 billion galaxies and the stars within them, creating a treasure trove of data for astronomers that includes each galaxy's shape, mass and number of stars created per year. Euclid's ability to see in near-infrared light could also reveal previously unseen objects in our own Milky Way galaxy, such as brown dwarfs and ultra-cool stars.

In May 2027, Euclid will be joined in orbit by the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. The two missions will overlap in their study of cosmic acceleration as they both create three-dimensional maps of the universe...Roman will study one-twentieth of the sky in infrared light, allowing for much more depth and precision. The Roman telescope will peer back to when the universe was just 2 billion years old, picking out fainter galaxies than Euclid can see.
CNN points out that "While primarily an ESA mission, the telescope includes contributions from NASA and more than 2,000 scientists across 13 European countries, the United States, Canada and Japan."

And they also note this statement from Jason Rhodes, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "With these upcoming telescopes, we will measure dark energy in different ways and with far more precision than previously achievable, opening up a new era of exploration into this mystery."

From NASA's announcement: Scientists are unsure whether the universe's accelerated expansion is caused by an additional energy component, or whether it signals that our understanding of gravity needs to be changed in some way. Astronomers will use Roman and Euclid to test both theories at the same time, and scientists expect both missions to uncover important information about the underlying workings of the universe...

Less concentrated mass, like clumps of dark matter, can create more subtle effects. By studying these smaller distortions, Roman and Euclid will each create a 3D dark matter map... Tallying up the universe's dark matter across cosmic time will help scientists better understand the push-and-pull feeding into cosmic acceleration.
SpaceX tweeted footage of the telescope's takeoff, and the successful landing of their Falcon 9's first stage on a droneship called A Shortfall of Gravitas.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Pokemon GO maker Niantic laid off 230 employees today, just one year after it laid off around 90 employees. During last year's layoffs, Niantic canceled four projects, including a Transformers game. Some Niantic games will meet the same fate this time around. After four months in the App Store, Niantic is shutting down NBA All-World; the company will also cancel production on a game based on the Marvel franchise. "In the wake of the revenue surge we saw during Covid, we grew our headcount and related expenses in order to pursue growth more aggressively," CEO John Hanke wrote in an email to employees, cross-posted to the company blog.

This has been a common refrain among the hundreds of tech companies that have conducted layoffs over the last year -- companies claimed they overhired during the pandemic and now need to right-size their teams. In Niantic's case, Hanke said that revenue has returned to pre-pandemic levels, and new projects have not delivered as much revenue as they would have hoped. One such new project is Peridot, a Tamagotchi-like mobile game. Niantic's first attempt at original IP since Ingress, Peridot launched in May. But according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, Peridot has only made $1.4 million in gross in-app purchase revenue thus far. [...] Pokemon GO is Niantic's cash cow, pulling in more than $1 billion in in-app purchases each year since 2020. But players have also been feeling slighted by Niantic's in-app purchase system. [...]

Though games like Peridot have not yet proved financially sustainable, Niantic has an entire business arm separate from its own games. Niantic's Lightship AR developer kit makes it possible for any developer who knows how to use Unity to make AR games. Developers also have access to Niantic's impressive visual positioning system (VPS), which lets users interact with local landmarks in their real-world surroundings. Hanke even mentioned in his note to employees that the company wants to ramp up its focus on building for mixed-reality devices and AR glasses. So, if Niantic can't seem to make a successful follow-up to Pokemon GO, maybe its developer tools can keep the company on the right track.

In August, white-hat hackers at the DEFCON hacker convention will compete to try and breach the computer systems on a satellite in orbit. It took four years, but "this year, we are in space for real," said Steve Colenzo, Technology Transfer Lead for the Air Force Research Laboratory's Information Directorate in Rome, New York, and one of the contest organizers. From a report: Hack-A-Sat 4, taking place live at DEFCON Aug. 10-13 in Las Vegas, will be the first-ever hacking contest staged on a vehicle in orbit. In previous years, the contests used genuine working satellite hardware, but running safely on the ground. [...] Hack-A-Sat 4 is an attack/defend contest in which teams compete to hack each other's systems while defending their own. It is being staged by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the U.S. Space Force. More than 380 teams signed up for the qualification round in April, and the eight top-scoring ones, which include contestants from Australia, Germany, Italy and Poland, as well as the U.S., will participate in the finals at DEFCON.

"We always knew our objective was to do this in space," Colenzo said. But when, back in 2020, organizers asked satellite operators if they could stage a hacking contest on their space assets, "The answer, and there was really no hesitation, the answer was always no." Hack-A-Sat organizers realized that, if they wanted to reach their objective of staging such a contest in space, they would have to launch their own satellite, Colenzo said. The Moonlighter satellite was launched on a SpaceX rideshare rocket to the International Space Station June 5 by the U.S. government-backed non-profit The Aerospace Corporation. It's a foot-long toaster-sized cubesat satellite with extendable solar panels.

If all goes according to plan, Moonlighter will be deployed into orbit early in July, Project leader Aaron Myrick told Newsweek. Moonlighter is designed to be hacked, he said, and there are numerous safety measures in place. "The first thing that we said was that propulsion was off the table," Moonlighter can't change its own orbit, which might make it a hazard to other satellites. And its ground controllers have the ability to reboot the system, kicking out any intruders and restoring their control.

"California startup Varda Space Industries launched its first test mission on June 12," reports CNN, "successfully sending a 200-pound (90-kilogram) capsule designed to carry drug research into Earth's orbit.

"The experiment, conducted in microgravity by simple onboard machines, aims to test whether it would be possible to manufacture pharmaceuticals in space remotely." Research has already established that protein crystals grown in a weightless environment can result in more perfect structures compared with those grown on Earth. These space-formed crystals could potentially then be used to create better-performing drugs that the human body can more easily absorb.
"Its research, company officials hope, could lead to better, more effective drugs — and hefty profits," CNN reported earlier this week: "It's not as sexy a human-interest story as tourism when it comes to commercialization of the cosmos," said Will Bruey, Varda's CEO and cofounder. "But the bet that we're making at Varda is that manufacturing is actually the next big industry that gets commercialized." Varda launched its first test mission Monday aboard a SpaceX rocket, which took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California just after 2:30 pm PT. The company then confirmed in a tweet that its satellite successfully separated from the rocket...

If successful, Varda hopes to scale its business rapidly, sending regular flights of satellites into orbit stuffed with experiments on behalf of pharmaceutical companies. Eventually, the firm hopes that research will yield a golden ticket drug, one that proves to be better when manufactured in space and can return royalties to Varda for years to come... Founded less than three years ago, Varda has gone from an idea to a company with more than $100 million in seed funding and grants, a 68,000-square-foot factory, and a satellite in space. Its workforce has grown to nearly 100 employees...

One day, the company hopes Varda flights will be so common that its capsules will blaze across the night sky every evening, like shooting stars to those on the ground who catch a glimpse. From there, Varda could even look to develop a research platform on a private space station, where pharma researchers could travel themselves.

Cybersecurity experts at CyberCX have demonstrated a simple method for consistently accessing older BIOS-locked laptops by shorting pins on the EEPROM chip with a screwdriver, enabling full access to the BIOS settings and bypassing the password. Tom's Hardware reports: Before we go further, it is worth pointing out that CyberCX's BIOS password bypass demonstration was done on several Lenovo laptops that it had retired from service. The blog shows that the easily reproducible bypass is viable on the Lenovo ThinkPad L440 (launched Q4 2013) and the Lenovo ThinkPad X230 (launched Q3 2012). Other laptop and desktop models and brands that have a separate EEPROM chip where passwords are stored may be similarly vulnerable. [...] From reading various documentation and research articles, CyberCX knew that it needed to follow the following process on its BIOS-locked Lenovo laptops: Locate the correct EEPROM chip; Locate the SCL and SDA pins; and Short the SCL and SDA pins at the right time.

Checking likely looking chips on the mainboard and looking up series numbers eventually lead to being able to target the correct EEPROM. In the case of the ThinkPad L440, the chip is marked L08-1 X (this may not always be the case). An embedded video in the CyberCX blog post shows just how easy this 'hack' is to do. Shorting the L08-1 X chip pins requires something as simple as a screwdriver tip being held between two of the chip legs. Then, once you enter the BIOS, you should find that all configuration options are open to be changed. There is said to be some timing needed, but the timing isn't so tight, so there is some latitude. You can watch the video for a bit of 'technique.'

CyberCX includes some quite in-depth analysis of how its BIOS hack works and explains that you can't just short the EEPROM chips straight away as you turn the machine on (hence the need for timing). Some readers may be wondering about their own laptops or BIOS-locked machines they have seen on eBay and so on. CyberCX says that some modern machines with the BIOS and EEPROM packages in one Surface Mount Device (SMD) would be more difficult to hack in this way, requiring an "off-chip attack." The cyber security firm also says that some motherboard and system makers do indeed already use an integrated SMD. Those particularly worried about their data, rather than their system, should implement "full disk encryption [to] prevent an attacker from obtaining data from the laptop's drive," says the security outfit.

A SpaceX capsule carrying a former NASA astronaut and three paying customers returned from the International Space Station, marking the conclusion of a historic weeklong mission for the crew. From a report: The Crew Dragon spacecraft departed the space station Tuesday morning and the crew spent nearly 12 hours in orbit as the capsule maneuvered back toward Earth. After a fiery reentry, the Crew Dragon and passengers made a safe splashdown off the coast of Panama City, Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico at 11:04 p.m. ET. This mission, dubbed Axiom Mission 2, or AX-2, launched from Florida on May 21. AX-2 was put together by the Houston-based company Axiom Space and marked the second all-private mission to the orbiting outpost, meaning solely commercial companies, rather than a government agency, have been leading the mission.

This mission was also a milestone in the history of spaceflight as stem cell researcher Rayyanah Barnawi became the first woman from Saudi Arabia to travel to space. The AX-2 mission is one in a lineup of commercial missions designed to spur private sector participation in spaceflight -- particularly in low-Earth orbit, where the International Space Station orbits. Former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, 63, led the AX-2 crew. Whitson, now an Axiom Space employee, also became the first woman to command a private spaceflight. One of the three paying customers joining Whitson was John Shoffner, an American who made his fortune in the international telecom business and founded the hardware company Dura-Line Corp. Saudi Arabia also paid to fly two of its citizens: Barnawi and Ali AlQarni, a fighter pilot in the Royal Saudi Air Force.

During the mission, Barnawi led stem cell research suited for the microgravity environment aboard the space station. The orbiting laboratory has long been a key venue for various scientific experiments, as the lack of gravity can give researchers a better fundamental understanding of the topic at hand. Barnawi and AlQarni also engaged in outreach projects, including testing out a kite in microgravity and capturing video for viewers back home. The AX-2 crew spent about eight days working alongside astronauts representing NASA, Russia's Roscomos space agency and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency aboard the space station, though they operated on different schedules. The AX-2 crew worked through a lineup of more than 20 investigations and science projects -- including stem cell and other biomedical research. "Late tonight, at 11:02 pm local time in California (06:02 UTC Wednesday), SpaceX has a chance to reach 200 successful launches [of the Falcon 9 rocket] with a Starlink mission lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base," reports Ars Technica. "Such a performance is in uncharted territory for any orbital rocket, ever. [...] SpaceX is setting itself up to double the record for the number of consecutive successes by an orbital rocket."

You can view a livestream of the launch here.

The two Koreas are elevating a space race aimed at modernizing how each country monitors the other's improving military firepower. From a report: As hopes for a diplomatic breakthrough have dimmed in recent years, North and South Korea have grown more antagonistic toward one another and upped their displays of military might. They have traded missile tests. Pyongyang has sent drones that flew over downtown Seoul. South Korea has sharpened security and defense ties with the U.S. and Japan. The rise in tensions has elevated the importance -- and need -- for spy-satellite technology that neither country now has. South Korea cleared a significant technological marker on Thursday, launching multiple commercial satellites aboard a homegrown rocket for the first time. North Korea's Kim Jong Un regime stands poised to soon fly its first military reconnaissance satellite.

Nuri, South Korea's three-stage liquid-fuel rocket, blasted off at 6:24 p.m. local time Thursday from the Naro Space Center in Goheung, a city on the country's southern coast. The 200-ton rocket launched into space and deployed eight satellites into orbit about 342 miles above Earth, about 13 minutes after liftoff. Seoul has the clear technological advantage, weapons analysts say, though Pyongyang has been quick to advance its sanctioned missile program to develop long-range rockets that can carry satellites. Both nations remain years away from having a full-fledged network of spy satellites. But attaining the technology would allow the countries to identify military targets to precisely launch strikes during potential conflict without relying on their allies' satellite technology for information. In North Korea's case, space-based satellite technology is essential for its nuclear strategy. Having eyes in the sky would serve as an additional asset to launching nuclear strikes with better accuracy, said Yang Uk, a military expert at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank in Seoul. Should the technology progress enough, North Korea could potentially identify nuclear strike targets in the U.S., he added.

When Bill Gates took the stage at Stanford back in 1996, he was ready with his first joke after a long round of appreciative applause. "Maybe I dropped out of the wrong college."

But Bill Gates still cares about education. In 2019, a Gates Foundation commission even suggested valuing colleges by their affordability and accessibility, as well as the improvements they provide to economic mobility. And by those metrics, Gates writes on his blog, an emerging leader is Northern Arizona University (or NAU).


- Beginning this fall, an NAU program will make tuition free for students with family incomes below the state's median of $65,000.

- Half its students are first-generation college students.

- NAU recently launched a universal admissions program, "which redirects applicants who would have been denied entry to instead apply to community college," Gates writes. "From there, students are guaranteed subsequent admission to NAU as a transfer..."

- NAU has secured millions in scholarships and advising services for community college students planning to transfer to NAU.


So last weekend, Bill Gates delivered the commencement speech at Northern Arizona University, for graduates of its College of Engineering, Informatics, and Applied Sciences and College of the Environment, Forestry, and Natural Sciences. "You are graduating from an institution that creates opportunity, fosters innovation, and builds community, and it has prepared you to find solutions to some of the biggest problems facing us today," Gates told the audience.

Then he added "NAU is also giving you something I never received: A real college degree." Some of you might know that I never made it to my own graduation. I left after three semesters to start Microsoft. So, what does a college dropout know about graduation? Not much personally, to be honest.

As I prepared for today, I thought about how you, as new graduates, can have the biggest impact on the world with the education you received here. That led me to thinking about the graduation I never had, the commencement speech I never heard, and the advice I wasn't given on a day just like this one.

That is what I want to share with you this afternoon: The five things I wish I was told at the graduation I never attended.
Gates suggested the graduates seek careers solving the world's important problems. ("Some of you are heading off to start careers as programmers. You could use your talents to make sure all people can benefit from artificial intelligence — or to help eliminate biases in AI.") He ended his speech by telling the students "you will be the ones to solve the climate crisis and reduce the gap between the rich and poor."

But Gates also told the students not to be afraid to change their mind or their careers — and to be willing to admit they don't know everything. "Just about everything I have accomplished came because I sought out others who knew more. People want to help you. The key is to not be afraid to ask."
My fourth piece of advice is simple: Don't underestimate the power of friendship. When I was in school, I became friends with another student who shared a lot of my interests, like science fiction novels and computer magazines. Little did I know how important that friendship would be. My friend's name was Paul Allen — and we started Microsoft together...

The only thing more valuable than what you walk offstage with today is who you walk onstage with.

Companies in Apple's third-party repair program say delays in the process and high pricing for parts make it almost impossible to compete with the juggernaut. From a report: In 2021 Apple, under pressure from a Productivity Commission review on the "right to repair," launched its independent repair provider program in Australia. It was trumpeted as a way for small companies to compete with Apple to repair their products -- such as the iPhone -- using Apple tools and spare parts. At the time, repairers said they felt the move was a token gesture designed to head off any potential right-to-repair legislation that would have been recommended by the Productivity Commission review. Two years later, some say their fears have been realised. A number of repairers Guardian Australia has spoken to in Australia and the US suggest Apple's slow response times and the high cost for replacement parts makes it almost impossible for them to be viable competitors. The repairers requested anonymity to speak about the program, fearing that reprisals from the California-based tech giant might prevent them from remaining in the program.

Apple has indicated it takes an average of eight weeks for repairers to be admitted to the program, but repairers Guardian Australia has spoken to said the wait time can be up to six months -- and that it feels like the applications sit in a black hole, without any point of contact within Apple to provide an update on their status. Once repairers are admitted to the program, they receive training from Apple, as well as access to Apple parts, tools, repair manuals and diagnostic software for the company's iPhones and Macs. But they say the price of the parts, as well as the process to get a discounted rate for replacement parts, make it difficult for repairers to compete with Apple's own repair program. One repairer, who says his business repairs between 30 and 40 Apple products every week, said the average repair takes between an hour to an hour and a half. If it charge the rate Apple charges customers for repairs, then its maximum margin is about $60.

US authorities have seized another major Z-Library domain but still haven't been able to wipe the pirate book site off the Internet. From a report: Z-Library claims to offer over 13 million books, up from 11 million since US authorities launched their first major operation against Z-Library late last year. "Unfortunately, one of our primary login domains was seized today," Z-Library wrote in a Wednesday message on its Telegram account. "Therefore, we recommend using the domain singlelogin[dot]re to log in to your account, as well as to register. Please share this domain with others." In November, US authorities charged Russian nationals Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakova with criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud, and money laundering for allegedly operating Z-Library. The US said at the time that it seized 250 "interrelated web domains" run by Z-Library and that Napolsky and Ermakova were arrested in Argentina at the request of the US government. Other people continue to operate Z-Library, which remained available on the Tor network and returned to the clearnet in February with a new strategy of assigning personal, secret URLs to each user. Z-Library directed users to singlelogin[dot]me, where they could sign in with their login credentials and receive a unique URL to access the entire pirate library.

The European Space Agency appears to have a slight problem: a critical antenna is jammed on their Jupiter-bound spacecraft launched two weeks ago. From the Associated Press: The 52-foot (16-meter) radar antenna on Juice unfolded only one-third of the way following liftoff, according to the space agency. Engineers suspect a tiny pin may be protruding. Flight controllers in Germany plan to fire the spacecraft's engine in hopes of shaking the pin loose. If that doesn't work, they said they have plenty of time to solve the problem.

Juice, short for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, won't reach the giant planet until 2031. It's taking a roundabout path to get there, including gravity-assist flybys of Earth and our moon, and Venus. The radar antenna is needed to peer beneath the icy crust of three Jupiter moons suspected of harboring underground oceans and possibly life, a major goal of the nearly $1.8 billion mission. Its targets include Callisto, Europa and Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system.

Reddit moderators say they already see an increase in spam and that the future will "require a lot of human labor." From a report: In December last year, the moderators of the popular r/AskHistorians Reddit forum noticed posts popping up that appeared to carry the hallmarks of AI-generated text. "They were pretty easy to spot," said Sarah Gilbert, one of the forum's moderators and a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University. "They're not in-depth, they're not comprehensive, and they often contain false information." The team quickly realized their little corner of the internet had become a target for ChatGPT-created content. When ChatGPT launched last year, it set off a seemingly never-ending carousel of hype. According to evangelists, the tech behind ChatGPT may eradicate hundreds of millions of jobs, exhibit "sparks" of singularity-esque artificial general intelligence, and quite possibly destroy the world, but in a way that means you must buy it right now. The less glamorous impacts, like unleashing a tidal wave of AI-produced effluvium on the internet, haven't garnered the same attention so far.

The two-million-strong AskHistorians forum allows non-expert Redditors to submit questions about history topics, and receive in-depth answers from historians. Recent popular posts have probed the hive mind on whether the stress of being "on time" is a modern concept; what a medieval scribe would've done if the monastery cat left an inky paw print on their vellum; and how Genghis Khan got fiber in his diet. Shortly after ChatGPT launched, the forum was experiencing five to 10 ChatGPT posts per day, says Gilbert, which soon ramped up as more people found out about the tool. The frequency has tapered off now, which the team believes may be a consequence of how rigorously they've dealt with AI-produced content: even if the posts aren't being deleted for being written by ChatGPT, they tend to violate the sub's standards for quality.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: What's even harder-core than the IBM Model M? The Model F, the keyboard that launched alongside the IBM PC in 1981. After a 2017 relaunch, new models with the original layout are here. The project, which back in 2017 relaunched a modern keyboard inspired by a compact space-saver version of IBM's classic Model F, is launching its second generation of brand-new premium input devices, and this time, various layouts will be available. [...]

Enter the New Model F Keyboards project. "Ellipse" launched it in 2017 and attracted over $300,000 worth of orders, even at $399 each. Aside from the not-inconsiderable price, what put the author off was the layout. Space-saving and reduced-footprint keyboards are very popular among serious keyboard collectors, and the project chose two space-saver layouts from IBM's 4704 terminal, dubbed the Kishsaver after the collector who described it. The F77 layout has a numeric keypad, but no function keys; the even smaller F62 layout omits the keypad, or as the cool kids call it, it's a TKL layout, which we are informed stands for tenkeyless, presumably because it has 15 fewer keys.

Which is why the FOSS desk's bank account would tremble in fear if it were not an inanimate table in a database somewhere, because the Model F project has announced a new range, including full-size and compact 104-key layouts and most appealing to this large and heavy-handed vulture, a replica of the 122-key IBM Battleship, one of which we've been hunting for over a decade. The project occasionally has refurbished original IBM units. Now, though, a brand-new one is a $420 option. If that isn't exclusive enough, your correspondent also working on a model with beam springs, the mechanism from 1970s IBM business products. The first model of the brand new beam spring units is a mere $579.

Last month, a declassified FBI report revealed that the bureau had used Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to conduct multiple unlawful searches of a sitting Congress member's personal communications.

From a report by Ars Technica: Wired was the first to report the abuse, but for weeks, no one knew exactly which lawmaker was targeted by the FBI. That changed this week when Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) revealed during an annual House Intelligence Committee hearing on world threats that the FBI's abuse of 702 was "in fact" aimed at him. "This careless abuse by the FBI is unfortunate," LaHood said at the hearing, suggesting that the searches of his name not only "degrades trust in FISA" but was a "threat to separation of powers" in the United States. Calling the FBI's past abuses of Section 702 "egregious," the congressman -- who is leading the House Intelligence Committee's working group pushing to reauthorize Section 702 amid a steeply divided Congress -- said that "ironically," being targeted by the FBI gives him a "unique perspective" on "what's wrong with the FBI."

LaHood has said that having his own Fourth Amendment rights violated in ways others consider "frightening" positions him well to oversee the working group charged with implementing bipartisan reforms and safeguards that would prevent any such abuses in the future. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said that LaHood "personifies the fears and mistrust many in America have about the FBI's leadership," noting that "too many Americans are worried it could be them" next. FBI director Christopher Wray said that he "completely" understood LaHood's concerns, while emphasizing that the FBI has already implemented reforms and safeguards to prevent similar abuses in the future. An FBI spokesperson told Ars that "extensive changes" to address 702 compliance issues include "a whole new Office of Internal Audit currently focused on FISA compliance" and new policies requiring "enhanced pre-approval requirements before certain 'sensitive' US person queries can be run." The spokesperson provided an example, saying that for any sensitive queries involving elected officials, the FBI's deputy director must sign off. Wray said at the hearing that queries of the Section 702 database on US persons have dropped by 93 percent since last year. He also confirmed that the FBI launched "all sorts of mandatory enhanced training" initiatives on 702 compliance.
UPDATE: "At the same time, [LaHood] made clear that he still believes that Congress must reauthorize Section 702," reports the New York Times, "which he praised as a vital tool for combating a broad range of foreign threats."

Atomic weapons are complex, sensitive, and often pretty old. With testing banned, countries have to rely on good simulations to trust their weapons work. From a report: Flattened cities, millions of people burnt to death, and yet more tortured by radioactive fallout. That harrowing future may seem outlandish to some, but only because no nation has detonated a nuclear weapon in conflict since 1945. Countries including the US, Russia, and China wield hefty nuclear arsenals and regularly squabble over how to manage them -- only last week, Russia suspended participation in its nuclear arms reduction treaty with the US. Thankfully, nuclear warheads mostly just sit there, motionless and silent, cozy in their silos and underground storage caverns. If someone actually tried to use one, though, would it definitely go off as intended? "Nobody really knows," says Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear weapons historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology. The 20th century witnessed more than 2,000 nuclear tests -- the vast majority carried out by the US and the Soviet Union. And while these did prove the countries' nuclear capabilities, they don't guarantee that a warhead strapped to a missile or some other delivery system would work today.

Surprisingly, as far as we know, the US has only ever tested a live nuclear warhead using a live missile system once, way back in 1962. It was launched from a submarine. The Soviet Union had performed a similar test the previous year, and China followed in 1966. No nation has ever tested a nuclear warhead delivered by an intercontinental ballistic missile. The missile could blow up on the launchpad, explains Wellerstein. No one wants to clean that mess up. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has, sadly, brought the specter of nuclear weaponry to the fore once again. In February, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed new strategic nuclear weapons systems had been placed on combat duty, and he threatened to resume nuclear testing. Russia's former defense minister, Dmitry Medvedev, has been particularly vocal about his country's readiness to use nuclear weapons -- including against Ukraine. Russia has around 4,500 non-retired nuclear warheads, according to the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit that focuses on security. Roughly 2,000 are considered "tactical" -- smaller warheads that could be used on, for example, a foreign battlefield. To our knowledge, Russia has not begun "mating" those tactical warheads to delivery systems, such as missiles. Doing so involves certain safety risks, notes Lynn Rusten of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a think tank: "It would be really worrisome if we saw any indication that they were moving those warheads out of storage."

If they were brought into operation, multiple things could in theory go wrong with these weapons. For one thing, the delivery systems themselves might not be reliable. Mark Schneider, formerly of the US Department of Defense's senior executive service, has written about the many problems Russia has faced with its missiles so far during the war with Ukraine. Last spring, US officials said between 20 and 60 percent of Russian missiles were failing, either in terms of not launching or not hitting the intended target. That doesn't necessarily matter, though, notes Schneider. When firing a nuclear warhead with a big explosive yield, "accuracy is much less relevant," he says. Russia certainly has enough missiles to get a nuclear weapon more or less to where it wants -- even if it takes more than one attempt. But what about the warheads themselves? Modern thermonuclear devices are complex bits of machinery designed to initiate a specific explosive sequence, sometimes called a fission-fusion-fission reaction, which releases a massive amount of energy. Wellerstein points out that some warheads designed decades ago are still part of nuclear arsenals. Over time, their parts must be carefully checked for degradation and refurbished or replaced. But certain components can become unavailable due to changes in manufacturing capabilities.

The Linux Foundation's European off-shoot has formally launched the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF), a new collaborative effort designed to support interoperability between digital wallets through open source software. From a report: The launch comes some five months after the Linux Foundation first revealed plans to set up the OWF, shortly before it spun out a region-specific entity called the Linux Foundation Europe which is where the OWF will now officially reside. While the likes of PayPal, Google, and Apple are among the most recognized digital wallet providers, allowing consumers to conduct financial transactions in-store or online, digital wallets are increasingly being used to store all manner of virtual goods from student ID to driving licenses. On top of that, burgeoning technologies such as the metaverse and crypto are giving rise to greater use-cases for digital wallets.

But one thing all these various environments have in common is that the incumbent digital wallets, for the most part, don't play nicely with each other: an Apple Pay die-hard can't send money to their Google Pay brethren. And that is why the OWF is setting out to create an "open source engine" that can power interoperable digital wallets across myriad use-cases including identity, payments, and storing personal credentials such as employment and education certification.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned away an Ohio man's claim that his constitutional rights were violated when he was arrested and prosecuted for making satirical posts about his local police department on Facebook. The justices' rejection of Anthony Novak's appeal means his civil rights lawsuit against the Parma Police Department cannot move forward. With its decision, the court again declined to consider revisiting "qualified immunity," the contentious legal defense that lets police officers and other government officials off the hook in civil rights cases if constitutional violations have not been "clearly established" when they occur. At issue was whether a lower court correctly granted the police officers qualified immunity under the rationale that previous court precedent had not clearly established that Novak's actions constituted protected speech under the Constitution's First Amendment.

In March 2016, Novak set up a Facebook page that purported to be that of the Parma Police Department. He published six satirical posts in 12 hours, one of which claimed there was a job opening to which minorities were encouraged not to apply and another that warned people not to give food, money or shelter to homeless people. The police department, claiming the posts had disrupted its operations, launched an investigation and ultimately searched Novak's apartment, arrested him and jailed him for four days. Novak was charged under a state law that criminalizes disruption of police operations but acquitted at trial.

The police officers, Kevin Riley and Thomas Connor, say they had probable cause to arrest Novak because they genuinely believed his conduct was disrupting their operations. Novak sued the officers and the police department, saying they had violated his free speech rights, as well as his right to be free of unlawful searches and seizures under the Constitution's Fourth Amendment. After lengthy litigation, a federal judge dismissed Novak's claims. The Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in a ruling in April that "the officers reasonably believed they were acting within the law" even if his Facebook page was obviously a parody. That's because there was no court precedent saying it's a violation of the Constitution to be arrested in retaliation for satirical remarks when the officers have probable cause, the court said. Novak's appeal was backed by satirical news sites The Babylon Bee and The Onion, which filed a lighthearted brief saying its writers "have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists."

Thursday Instagram launched "Quiet mode" to "help people focus, and to encourage people to set boundaries with friends and followers.... Once enabled, you won't receive any notifications, your profile's activity status will change to 'In quiet mode' and we'll automatically send an auto-reply when someone DMs you.... and once the feature is turned off, we'll show you a quick summary of notifications so you can catch up on what you missed."

A report from the Verge notes the move "comes as Instagram faces mounting criticism over its effect on the mental health of teens, especially teenage girls." Since then, the company has been making a number of changes focused on the safety of its younger users, including tightening default content settings for teens, nudging teens away from content they continuously browse through, and introducing restrictions on the ways advertisers can target teens....

Instagram will specifically prompt teen users to toggle on Quiet Mode "when they spend a specific amount of time on Instagram late at night." However, the platform doesn't state how much time teens have to spend on the app to see the prompt and also doesn't say what timeframe it considers "late at night." Meta spokesperson Liza Crenshaw tells The Verge the notification will appear after "several minutes."
Quiet mode launched Thursday in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and New Zealand, with launches in other countries planned soon. Elsewhere the Verge reports that Meta is "putting your Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger account settings in one place." The company's rolling out a new Accounts Center that lets you manage your preferences across all your Meta accounts from a centralized hub. The revamped Accounts Center will live in the settings menu on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, which means you can adjust your account settings for Facebook from Instagram — and vice versa....

Some of the settings you can toggle include personal details, passwords, security, ad preferences, and payments as well as the permissions you've given each app. It doesn't seem like Meta will put all of your accounts in the Accounts Center by default, so you'll need to add them manually.
The feature launched Thursday and will roll out gradually to all users on Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram in "the coming months."

It was meant to be the first-ever orbital mission to take off from the United Kingdom — carried by a Virgin Orbit rocket launched from a private jumbo jet Monday over the Atlantic ocean, according to the BBC.

But instead "at an altitude of approximately 180km (111 miles), the upper stage experienced an anomaly which 'prematurely ended' the first burn. The company said this event ended the mission, with the rocket components and payload falling back to Earth within the approved safety corridor.,,,"

At this point the unmanned rocket became "a slow moving fireball in the sky," astrodynamics lecturer Marco Langbroek told Gizmodo in an email. The rocket's hellish descent was captured on video, revealing the unfortunate journey back from space. Ramón López, an observer at the Spanish Meteor Network, caught the rocket reentering Earth's atmosphere from Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa. He released the footage on YouTube, as well as on Twitter.
Earlier this week Space.com noted that four previous Virgin Orbit missions have all been successful, deploying a total of 33 satellites into orbit.