William A. Anders, the astronaut behind perhaps the single most iconic photo of our planet, has died at the age of 90.
On Friday morning, Anders was piloting a small plane that dove into the water near Roche Harbor, Wash. His son Greg confirmed his death.
Anders retired from the Air Force Reserve as a major general, but was a major at the time of the Apollo 8 mission in 1968.
Wow, is that pretty!”The resulting photograph, titled “Earthrise,” captured Earth’s loneliness and fragility in a way that no image ever had before.
“Here we came all the way to the moon to discover Earth,” he said.
A bug in an Irish government website that exposed COVID-19 vaccination records took two years to publicly discloseThe Irish government fixed a vulnerability two years ago in its national COVID-19 vaccination portal that exposed the vaccination records of around a million residents.
But details of the vulnerability weren’t revealed until this week after attempts to coordinate public disclosure with the government agency stalled and ended.
Security researcher Aaron Costello said he discovered the vulnerability in the COVID-19 vaccination portal run by the Irish Health Service Executive (HSE) in December 2021, a year after mass vaccinations against COVID-19 began in Ireland.
Costello’s public disclosure marks more than two years since first reporting the vulnerability.
His blog post included a multi-year timeline revealing a back and forth between various government departments that were unwilling to take claim to public disclosure.
Aura combines highly realistic voice models with a low-latency API to allow developers to build real-time, conversational AI agents.
Backed by large language models (LLMs), these agents can then stand in for customer service agents in call centers and other customer-facing situations.
Deepgram’s Aura combines human-like voice models that render extremely fast (typically in well under half a second) and, as Stephenson noted repeatedly, does so at a low price.
“Everybody now is like: ‘hey, we need real-time voice AI bots that can perceive what is being said and that can understand and generate a response — and then they can speak back,'” he said.
The Aura model, just like all of the company’s other models, were trained in-house.
Tesla’s factory outside Berlin, Germany will likely be shut down for days and cost the automaker more than $100 million, after a suspected arson attack on the local power grid.
The fire didn’t spread to Tesla’s factory and nobody was harmed, though employees were evacuated.
A purported activist organization calling itself the “Volcano Group” took credit for the fire in a letter posted online Tuesday.
The same group took credit for a similar fire near the site in 2021.
Last month, Tesla’s plan to expand the factory was also voted down by the public.
Over the weekend, hackers targeted federated social networks like Mastodon to carry out ongoing spam attacks that were organized on Discord, and conducted using Discord applications.
But Discord has yet to remove the server where the attacks are facilitated, and Mastodon community leaders have been unable to reach anyone at the company.
She told TechCrunch that while Discord has mechanisms for reporting individual users or messages, it lacks a clear way to report whole servers.
And as Smith notes, these mass spam attacks can drive up server costs, leaving admins with unexpected bills.
According to reports on Mastodon, this fully-automated attack was sparked by a conflict between teenagers on two different Japanese language Discord servers.
All smartwatches should offer multiple days of battery life, full stop.
According to a blog post, the company took a “three-year hiatus and a reflective pause following the OnePlus Watch 1.”Battery is precisely the sort of thing OnePlus needs to lean into.
That said, it doesn’t take hours of direct conversations with users to know that battery life is paramount on smartwatches.
Perhaps leaning into battery life in a meaningful way will improve its fortunes for round two.
That said, anything that re-centralizes the importance of better battery life is probably a net positive for the category.
Ingenuity, the small helicopter that’s been buzzing around the Red Planet for almost three years, has taken its final flight.
NASA announced today that at least one of the helicopter’s carbon fiber rotor blades was damaged during its last mission, grounding it for good.
As NASA Administrator Bill Nelson explained in a statement today, Ingenuity was up against the very, very thin Martian atmosphere, which is less than 1% as dense as Earth’s.
It arrived on the Red Planet attached to the underside of the Perseverance rover, which is still active on Mars’ surface.
Just last week, NASA experienced a two-day communications blackout with the little helicopter after it conducted what turned out to be its final flight.
Ingenuity, the small helicopter that’s been buzzing around the Red Planet for almost three years, has taken its final flight.
NASA announced today that at least one of the helicopter’s carbon fiber rotor blades was damaged during its last mission, grounding it for good.
As NASA Administrator Bill Nelson explained in a statement today, Ingenuity was up against the very, very thin Martian atmosphere, which is less than 1% as dense as Earth’s.
It arrived on the Red Planet attached to the underside of the Perseverance rover, which is still active on Mars’ surface.
Just last week, NASA experienced a two-day communications blackout with the little helicopter after it conducted what turned out to be its final flight.
