It’s been at least a few days since a new Facebook privacy scandal dropped, so we’re long overdue. According to a new posting , the company introduced a bug into its photo API earlier this year that gave connected apps too much access to your pictures. Even if you never made a photo public, an app developer may have it. We have seen a few social network API fails lately — most notable on Google’s now-doomed Google+ platform. However, those vulnerabilities just covered profile fields rather than your photos. The broken API is supposed to only grant access to photos shared to your timeline.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe set a record when it launched earlier this year as the with a top speed of around 430,000 miles per hour. It’s not done making history, though. Parker has already completed its first flyby of the sun’s corona, and NASA says the probe’s early performance is . Parker is an important step for NASA, which has wanted to study the sun’s corona up-close for decades. However, the technology to protect a probe in that environment didn’t exist until recently. It’s counterintuitive, but the corona of ionized plasma around the sun is much hotter than the surface of the star itself.
Want to beef up your poker game? What about getting good at chess? This week’s Humble Book Bundle by Wiley is designed to help you improve your strategies and overall competence with a bunch of marvelous DRM-free ebooks. • For a single clam, you can work on crosswords, cryptograms, sudoku, chess, and more. And since they’re DRM-free, you can easily print out anything you want to mark up with a pencil. Spend at least $1Cryptic Crosswords For DummiesThe Puzzle Addict’s Book of Codes: 250 Totally Addictive Cryptograms for You to CrackSu Doku For DummiesChess Openings For DummiesThe Complete Book of Fun Maths: 250 Confidence-boosting Tricks, Tests and PuzzlesOpt for the middle level, and you’ll snag books on casino gambling, more sudoku, and lots of poker.
Fluoride is better known for its positive correlation with improved dental health than with batteries, at least in the eyes of the general public. But there’s reason to be hopeful that it could one day do double duty, substantially increasing the energy density of batteries. Fluoride was first explored in battery chemistry in the 1970s, but could only be made to work in solid-state batteries, which operate at much higher temperatures than conventional devices. A breakthrough in fluoride battery chemistry could be instrumental in speeding the development of electric vehicles and allowing for an increased adoption of renewable power.
Honor and Xiaomi have both pre-announced phones using new 48MP sensor designs. Huawei subsidiary Honor’s View 20 — officially launched this week — taps Sony’s IMX586 version, and Xiaomi is teasing a 48MP model with an unknown sensor, perhaps either Sony’s or Samsung’s similar chip. Whether phone makers use Sony or Samsung for the new models, base specs are fairly similar. Both companies sensors are a bit larger than most current phone cameras, at 1/2.0 inches. That still gives them tiny .8 micron pixels, but they each offer 4-photosite binning to natively output 10MP images. Like previous super-high-resolution sensors for phones, this raises the question of whether they’ve passed the point of diminishing returns on resolution, and have indeed gone so far in that direction that they’re just adding processing overhead without increasing image quality.
SpaceX and Boeing are both working toward full certification of their respective spacecraft to carry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). it’s been a long road, but SpaceX was set to launch its first demonstration mission (Demo-1) on Jan. 7th, 2019. There has been yet another delay, but at least this one is short. The launch is . NASA frames this as an “adjustment” rather than a delay. Although, delays are nothing new in spaceflight. It’s a high-stakes mission even if there won’t be any passengers aboard. Even a small error could result in a significant setback as NASA and SpaceX scramble to identify and fix the issue.
Several days ago, a gust of wind swept across Elysium Planitia on the surface of Mars. This has happened uncountable times over the eons, but never before was a robot on hand to record the sound of that wind. Now, NASA’s InSight lander is sitting on Elysium Planitia with a suite of instruments designed to study the geology of Mars. It turns out, they can also for the first time ever. The new recording comes from two of InSight’s sensors, neither one of which was intended for this particular use. The lander’s seismometer is currently stowed while NASA plans the delicate process of setting it on the ground and shielding it from the wind.
Australia is now the first Western nation to ban security, following a decision by its parliament to pass a bill forcing companies to hand over encrypted data to police upon demand. The government will be allowed to demand this without judicial review or oversight of any kind, beyond the requirement to get a warrant in the first place. Furthermore, the law requires corporations to build tools to give them the ability to intercept data sought by police when such tools do not already exist. While the bill has only passed Australia’s lower chamber, the upper chamber has indicated it will pass the legislation provided there are later votes on unspecified amendments to the current bill.
After 41 years traveling through the solar system, NASA’s Voyager 2 probe has . That makes it the second human artifact to leave our home behind to drift between the stars. You might be thinking this already happened, but that’s because the first object out of the solar system was . They’re both in interstellar space now, but they had very different journeys. Voyager 2 launched on Aug. 20, 1977, atop a Titan 3E rocket. It was actually the first of the Voyager spacecraft to reach space. Voyager 1 launched a few weeks later on Sept. 5th. That probe made its way outside our solar bubble six years ago.
