When the FCC in February 2015 under Tom Wheeler, the tech industry and individual users hailed them as a huge win for citizens and the open internet. By refusing to allow ISPs to establish so-called ‘fast lanes’ for certain kinds of traffic (and charging for the privilege), the FCC had helped ensure the internet wouldn’t bifurcate into a digital haves-vs-have-nots. The FCC under Ajit Pai is going to undo those rules today, despite widespread opposition from citizens, the tech industry, 18 state attorney generals, and calls from Congress to refrain from doing so. And according to former FCC chairman Michael Powell, now the president of The Internet & Television Association (a lobbying group), all the concern about killing net neutrality is nothing but hyperbolic whining.
Blue Origin, the private space firm started by founder Jeff Bezos, has . This is the first launch for Blue Origin in more than a year, and it’s also the first time it has tested its new Crew Capsule 2.0. This brings Blue Origin one step closer to sending up human passengers. This was the first launch of the upgraded new Shepard, but it’s still a rather humble rocket even with the latest design improvements. New Shepard is a single-stage rocket, so it’s just the booster you see at launch, plus a payload. In this case, the payload is the new (unmanned) Crew Capsule 2.0.
The Juno space probe was launched back in 2011 on course for Jupiter. It arrived in orbit of the gas giant in summer 2016 after five years of travel, and it began sending back stunning images and extensive scientific data early this year. One of the primary duties of Juno is to study the iconic Great Red Spot, a giant cyclone that has been churning in Jupiter’s clouds for centuries. A newly released study based on Juno data includes the . Scientists have long wondered how deep the Great Red Spot goes, and now we know thanks to Juno.
Bitcoin’s price has been rising for the past two months and skyrocketing for the past few weeks. As of this writing, prices are fluctuating wildly across multiple exchanges, with some listing a per-BTC price as high as $18,259 and others holding around the $16,500 mark. It’s unusual to see gaps that large between exchanges, and the cryptocurrency’s price-per-BTC has exploded in the last year — but especially in the past few weeks. The graph below shows how BTC’s value has changed from January 1 2017 to December 7. Whatever the number underneath that line graph says, it’s definitely different now.
EA’s entire corporate response to the Battlefront II controversy should be taught in future marketing and corporate communication classes as an example of how to never handle a problem. The company ignored increasingly angry player feedback, poor reviews, and mathematical analysis of its own microtransaction-fueled, pay-to-win progression system. Even to remove MTX just hours before the game launched was reportedly driven by a phone call from Disney, as opposed to EA CFO Blake Jorgensen realizing the Death Star’s shields were still up. But now, at last, an inkling of self-awareness has penetrated the corporate mothership. “Of COURSE the shield is down.
A few decades ago, the space around Earth was empty. It’s very much not empty anymore with a multitude of satellites and an operational International Space Station. The space around Earth is also home to many years worth of abandoned satellites, rocket boosters, and other bits of debris flying around at incredible speeds. All that space junk has become an increasingly serious problem, as even a small impact can completely destroy a working satellite or spacecraft. Now, NASA is in hopes of developing better defenses. NASA and other space agencies keep tabs on larger pieces of space junk that are a few centimeters to a few meters in size.
Tesla has been pushing autonomous technology hard in its all-electric vehicles, but thus far it’s only been able to manage partial automation. That could change in the coming years, with news that is moving full-speed ahead with plans to develop its own AI chip. CEO Elon Musk claims the company’s AI hardware will be the best in the world. Musk is sometimes prone to flights of fancy, but he’s also right a lot of the time. Musk was giving a talk at the NIPS 2017 AI conference when he talked about the upcoming custom chip. The effort is reportedly being spearheaded by Tesla’s president of hardware, former AMD chip architect Jim Keller.
In the run-up to last August’s , doctors and health officials strenuously warned that no one should attempt to look at the sun without proper eye protection. The issue got some additional visibility when some of the glasses sold on Amazon were found to be fake. The problem isn’t that the sun is brighter during an eclipse, but that humans rarely have much reason to stare at our lovely ball of burning gas, and consequently don’t attempt to do so on a regular basis. But there are always people who either doubt how dangerous something is or simply never hear about it, and one such case has appeared.
The internet can be a marvelous thing that gives us access to all the world’s information. However, it also gives us access to all the world’s malware. Every browser maker has implemented tougher security in recent years, but Google and Microsoft are particularly intent on competing with each other. In the latest volley, Google has rolled out a in Chrome called site isolation. It’s a stronger version of the browser’s existing sandboxing feature. Starting in Chrome v63, which is rolling out now, administrators have the option of enabling site isolation on client machines. This feature uses a separate process for each page the user loads, rather than using the main Chrome process for everything in a window.
