NASA's latest Mars lander, InSight, successfully touched down on the surface of the Red Planet moments ago, surviving an intense plunge through the Martian atmosphere. From a report: It marks the eighth picture-perfect landing on Mars for NASA, adding to the space agency's impressive track record of putting spacecraft on the planet. And now, InSight's two-year mission has begun, one that entails listening for Marsquakes to learn about the world's interior. After six and a half months of traveling through space, InSight hit the top of Mars' atmosphere a little before 3PM ET. It then made a daring descent to the surface, performing a complex multi-step routine that slowed the lander from more than 12,000 miles per hour to just 5 miles per hour before it hit the ground. To get to the surface safely, InSight had to autonomously deploy a supersonic parachute, gather radar measurements, and ignite its thrusters all at the right time. Altogether, the landing took just under seven minutes to complete, prompting the nickname "seven minutes of terror." "InSight's view is a flat, smooth expanse called Elysium Planitia, but its workspace is below the surface, where it will study Mars' deep interior," Nasa posted Monday, sharing the first photo after the landing.

Starting this week, businesses in Ohio will be able to pay taxes in bitcoin through a new platform, OhioCrypto.com, a first in the US. From a report: For many enthusiasts, part of the appeal of crypto has been the very fact that these currencies are not backed by governments. That makes it harder for politicians to manipulate currencies to their own ends, they say. But for the same reason, states have sought to sideline cryptocurrencies, comfortable to dismiss bitcoin as a passing fad. So Ohio, and its treasurer Josh Mandel, see embracing them as a way to signal that the state is tech-savvy and forward-thinking. "I do see [bitcoin] as a legitimate form of currency," Mandel told (paywall) the Wall Street Journal.

As Facebook struggles to find an audience for its YouTube competitor, Watch, the company has been talking to some media companies about focusing its efforts on audiences 30 years and older instead of teens and younger millennials. From a report: The move signals more troubles for Facebook's video ambitions. Expansion in video, messaging, and Stories are key for the future of Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a call with analysts in October.

Wave723 writes: What do a Silicon Valley massage spa, a local community college, and a Californian plastics manufacturer have in common? They will soon be testing hundreds of cutting-edge wireless devices, according to an application for an experimental permit filed last week with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC). If that sounds unlikely, it is. It seems much more likely that the new devices will actually be tested at three nearby Amazon facilities. These include two buildings belonging to the company's secretive Lab126 research division, and one of the retailer's largest fulfillment centers in the state.

On November 19, a company called Chrome Enterprises LLC sought permission to test up to 450 prototype devices using Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), a new technology that aims to deliver ultra-fast wireless broadband over shared radio frequencies. In particular, CBRS opens access to a radio frequency band (3.5 Gigahertz) that the FCC had previously set aside for military use, and makes it so that the military can share that band with anyone who buys a router or phone that supports the service, or has a cell phone plan with a carrier that has paid for a sliver of the band.

U.S. Supreme Court justices on Monday appeared open to letting a lawsuit proceed against Apple that accused it of breaking federal antitrust laws by monopolizing the market for iPhone software applications and causing consumers to overpay. From a report: The nine justices heard an hour of arguments in an appeal by the Cupertino, California-based technology company of a lower court's decision to revive the proposed class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in California in 2011 by a group of iPhone users seeking monetary damages. The lawsuit said Apple violated federal antitrust laws by requiring apps to be sold through the company's App Store and then taking a 30 percent commission from the purchases. The case may hinge on how the justices will apply one of its past decisions to the claims against Apple. That 1977 ruling limited damages for anti-competitive conduct to those directly overcharged rather than indirect victims who paid an overcharge passed on by others.

The next time you see, say, a wedding scene on a USA Network show followed by a champagne commercial, it may not be a coincidence. From a report: NBCUniversal announced a new machine learning tool today that helps brands place ads around scenes relevant to their product across any of the media giant's broadcast and cable properties. The Contextual Intelligence Platform analyzes programming scripts, closed captioning data and visual descriptors of both ads and shows to find opportune moments for a given advertiser to appear as well as an emotional gauge for each scene determined by proprietary algorithms.

Focus groups for ads placed with the platform thus far have shown an average bump of 19 percent in brand memorability, 13 percent in likability and 64 percent in message memorability, according to Josh Feldman, vp and head of marketing and advertising creative, NBCU. The announcement comes as linear television providers continue to grapple with how to bring digital targeting practices to a medium that still largely operates on traditional phone-call media buying and manual ad placements. NBCU is now working with three to five advertisers for the system's beta-test, and is aiming for an official release date early next year.

German government would like to regulate what kind of routers are sold and installed across the country. From a report: The German government published at the start of the month an initial draft for rules on securing Small Office and Home Office (SOHO) routers. Published by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), the rules have been put together with input from router vendors, German telecoms, and the German hardware community. Once approved, router manufacturers don't have to abide by these requirements, but if they do, they can use a special sticker on their products showing their compliance. The 22-page document, available in English here, lists tens of recommendations and rules for various router functions and features.

YouTube has concluded that its investments in original programming should have a home on the free, ad-supported side -- not just tucked behind a paywall. Variety: In a shift in strategy, the Google-owned video platform said that starting next year it will move to make all of its new original programming available for free for anyone to watch. With the change, YouTube is moving toward more mainstream celebrity-driven and creator-based reality fare, while it will continue to greenlight scripted productions. Until now, YouTube Originals have mainly been available on its YouTube Premium subscription service, although YouTube also has expanded the shows and movies it makes available on an ad-supported basis. "As we look to 2019, we will continue to invest in scripted programming and shift to make our YouTube Originals ad supported to meet the growing demand of a more global fanbase," a YouTube rep said in a statement. "This next phase of our originals strategy will expand the audience of our YouTube Original creators, and provide advertisers with incredible content that reaches the YouTube generation."

Algorithms used by airlines to split up those travelling together unless they pay more to sit next to each other have been called "exploitative" by a government minister. From a report: Speaking to a parliamentary communications committee, Digital Minister Margot James described the software as "a very cynical, exploitative means... to hoodwink the general public." She added: "Some airlines have set an algorithm to identify passengers of the same surname travelling together. They've had the temerity to split the passengers up, and when the family want to travel together they are charged more." It's an issue that will be looked at by the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, launched by the government this week to identify and address areas where clearer guidelines and regulation are needed in how data is used. Passengers first started noticing they were being split up from their party if they didn't pay more for allocated seating in June 2017, with Ryanair most commonly associated with the practice.

For the first time, a scientist claims to have used a powerful new gene-editing technique to create genetically modified human babies. From a report: The scientist, He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, says he used human embryos modified with the gene-editing technique CRISPR to create twin girls. "Two beautiful little Chinese girls name Lulu and Nana came crying into the world as healthy as any other babies a few weeks ago." He says in a video posted online. "The babies are home now with their mom Grace and their dad Mark." He says his team performed "gene surgery" on embryos created from their parents' sperm and eggs to protect the children from the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, which causes AIDS. The children' father is HIV-positive. "When Lulu and Nana were just a single cell, this surgery removed a doorway through which HIV enter to infect people," He says in the video, one of several posted online to justify and explain the work. Because the research has not yet been published in a scientific journal or carefully vetted by other scientists, many researchers and bioethicists remain cautious about the claim.

An anonymous reader shares a report: With his cellphone in one hand, and two wooden meditation balls in the other, Zhang Siqi queued up alongside throngs of fellow retirees that make up the morning rush at a small Beijing grocery store. Zhang, a Beijing native, then opened the WeChat mobile pay tab on his phone and scanned it at the automatic register to pay for some fruit and a pack of cigarettes with a savviness that belied his age.

That cutting-edge payment method is rapidly becoming so common in Beijing and other large cities that experts have begun referring to the Chinese capital as a prototype of the futuristic cashless society. In 2017, the country saw $15 trillion in mobile payments, the Wall Street Journal reported, far outstripping the US. While Zhang has been using WeChat social media and mobile pay functions for a few years now, the 63-year-old knows not every Chinese senior citizen is equally adept.

"Some old people find it difficult to keep up with technology. Many retirees have poor eyesight, and struggle to see the screen, or have a poor memory and keep forgetting how to use the apps," he said, pocketing his phone with his right hand, and rolling the wooden meditation balls with his left. Those issues were brought into sharp focus recently by a viral video of an older Chinese patron in northern China arguing with the staff at the checkout of a supermarket in northern China over how to pay for a bag of grapes -- the staff told him he needed to pay by app, but eventually relented and allowed him to pay by cash. A slew of viewers expressed sympathy for the demoralized customer, including consultant Matthew Brennan, who writes about China's ever-evolving tech scene.

Elon Musk reckons there's a 70 percent chance he'll go to Mars, even as he knows there's a good chance he won't survive there. "I'm talking about moving there," the SpaceX and Tesla CEO said in a wide-ranging, but brief interview with Axios on HBO. "We've recently made a number of breakthroughs that I'm just really fired up about."

In the interview, he also spoke about Neuralink, the company he launched last year to build brain-enhancing implants. "The long-term aspiration of Neuralink would be to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence," he said. "If we have billions of people with a high-bandwidth link to an AI extension of themselves, it would actually make everyone hyper-smart."

Musk also revealed that Tesla had been "single-digit weeks" away from death with the company "bleeding" cash as it ramped up Model 3 production. He said he was worried about imploding and that the stress of working seven days a week and sleeping at the Tesla factory was very painful."It hurts my brain and my heart," said Musk, who recently publicly urged people to explore electric cars, even if they come from companies Tesla competes with.

Richard Stallman doesn't like bitcoin, and has never used it, reports CoinDesk: To Stallman, bitcoin isn't suitable as a digital payment system. His biggest complaint: bitcoin's poor privacy protections. He told CoinDesk, "What I'd really like is a way to make purchases anonymously from various kinds of stores, and unfortunately it wouldn't be feasible for me with bitcoin." Using a crypto exchange would allow that company and ultimately the government to identify him, he said.... Asked what he thought about so-called privacy coins, Stallman said he'd gotten an expert to assess their potential, and "for each one he would point out some serious problems, perhaps in its security or its scalability." And speaking broadly, Stallman continued: "If bitcoin protected privacy, I'd probably have found a way to use it by now."
Fortunately, Stallman's GNU Project has a better answer: The GNU Project, which Stallman founded, is working on an alternative digital payments system called Taler, which is based on cryptography but is not -- forgive the hair-splitting -- a cryptocurrency. The Taler project's maintainer Christian Grothoff told CoinDesk that the system is, rather, designed for a "post-blockchain" world.... It's based on blind signatures, a cryptographic technique invented by David Chaum, whose DigiCash was among the first attempts at creating secure electronic money. Plus, Taler's attempt to create a digital money that resists surveillance by governments and payments companies aligns it with many cryptocurrency projects.

Yet, Taler does not attempt to bypass centralized authority. Payments are processed by openly centralized "exchanges" rather than peer-to-peer networks of miners because, Grothoff said, such a system "would again enable dangerous, money laundering kind of practice." Indeed, in a break with the anti-government ethos that has tended to characterize bitcoin and some of its peers, Taler's design explicitly tries to block opportunities for tax evasion.... Privacy in the Taler system, then, is limited to users spending their digital cash. They are shielded from surveillance because, Grothoff said, "the exchange, when coins are being redeemed, cannot tell if it was customer A or customer B or customer C who received the coin, because they all look identical from the exchange. Nobody," he added, "exactly knows who has how many tokens." Merchants (or anyone) receiving payments, on the other hand, do so visibly and in the open, making it possible for governments to assess taxes on their income -- not to mention harder for the recipients to participate in money laundering....

Currently, Taler is in talks with European banks to allow withdrawal into the Taler wallet and also re-deposit from the Taler system back into the traditional banking system.
"I wouldn't want perfect privacy," Stallman says in the interview, "because that would mean it would be impossible to investigate crimes at all. And that's one of the jobs we need the state to do."

An anonymous reader quotes the South China Morning Post: Since last year, many Chinese cities have cracked down on jaywalking by investing in facial recognition systems and AI-powered surveillance cameras. Jaywalkers are identified and shamed by displaying their photographs on large public screens... Developments are also underway to engage the country's mobile network operators and social media platforms, such as Tencent Holdings' WeChat and Sina Weibo, to establish a system in which offenders will receive personal text messages as soon as they are caught violating traffic rules....

Making a compelling case for change is the recent experience of Dong Mingzhu, chairwoman of China's biggest maker of air conditioners Gree Electric Appliances, who found her face splashed on a huge screen erected along a street in the port city of Ningbo... That artificial intelligence-backed surveillance system, however, erred in capturing Dong's image on Wednesday from an advertisement on the side of a moving bus. The traffic police in Ningbo, a city in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, were quick to recognise the mistake, writing in a post on microblog Sina Weibo on Wednesday that it had deleted the snapshot. It also said the surveillance system would be completely upgraded to cut incidents of false recognition in future.
The article says the mistakenly-accused CEO's company later thanked the traffic police for their hard work, and "called on people to obey traffic rules to keep the streets safe."

"The Chinese government is currently working to combine the operations of more than 170 million public security cameras to strengthen its surveillance network's ability to track and monitor the country's 1.4 billion citizens. Research firm IHS Markit has estimated that the number of surveillance cameras in China could reach 450 million by 2020."

"Recently, I found a typo in the District of Columbia's legal code and corrected it using GitHub," writes D.C. based "civic hacker" Joshua Tauberer, adding "My feat highlights the groundbreaking way the District manages its legal code." The District does something with its legal code that no other jurisdiction in the world does (to my knowledge): it publishes the law on GitHub.... This isn't a copy of the DC law. It is an authoritative source. It is where the DC Council stores the digital versions of enacted laws, and this source feeds directly into the Council's DC Code website.... This is a milestone in the advancement of open government and open legal publishing.

No one should expect that editing the law on GitHub is going to become the new normal, however. My edit wasn't substantive. This sort of "technical correction," as lawyers would call it, didn't need to be passed by the Council and signed by the Mayor. I also happen to have expertise in this particular law, GitHub, XML, and the Council's new publishing process created by the Open Law Library.... GitHub's pull-request feature isn't going to replace public hearings, expert testimony, negotiations between stakeholders, votes by elected representatives, etc. -- and it shouldn't. Yet Open Law Library's new legal publishing process is groundbreaking. The Open Law Library is changing how we change the law...

Open Law Library's mission as a nonprofit is to make all laws as open and accessible as possible. The library's strategy is to achieve openness by making openness pay off for governments: it uses open, machine-readable laws to build software tools that make codification faster and more accurate. The cool thing about this is that governments can benefit from using Open Law Library's software even if open data isn't their highest priority, but in the background they'll still be publishing their laws in an open and accessible format -- everybody wins. Today, instead of authoring the DC Code in Word documents stored on a hard drive in a locked room in a basement, the Code is now stored in XML format in a place everyone can see -- on the Web."
The article notes that 18 more states have now enacted "Uniform Electronic Legal Material Acts" -- and that several other jurisdictions are already publishing their legal codes with official bulk XML downloads. "The US federal government began publishing XML downloads for the Code of Federal Regulations in 2009 and the United States Code in 2013."

But the District of Columbia "appears to be the first jurisdiction to combine the two by putting its legal code on GitHub and accepting a change from a member of the public."