Amazon.com plans to launch its first internet satellites to space in the first half of 2024 and offer initial commercial tests shortly after, the company said Tuesday, as it prepares to vie with Elon Musk's SpaceX and others to provide broadband internet globally. Reuters reports: Amazon's satellite internet unit, Project Kuiper, will begin mass-producing the satellites later this year, the company said. Those will be the first of over 3,000 satellites the technology giant plans to launch in low-Earth orbit in the next few years. "We'll definitely be beta testing with commercial customers in 2024," Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon devices, said at a conference in Washington.

The 2024 deployment target would keep Amazon on track to fulfill a regulatory mandate to launch half its entire Kuiper network of 3,236 satellites by 2026. Limp, who oversees Amazon's consumer devices powerhouse, said the company plans to make "three to five" satellites a day to reach that goal. With plans to pump more than $10 billion into the Kuiper network, Amazon sees its experience producing millions of devices from its consumer electronics powerhouse as an edge over rival SpaceX, the Musk-owned space company whose Starlink network already has roughly 4,000 satellites in space.

Amazon plans to launch a pair of prototype satellites early this year aboard a new rocket from the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance. The 2024 launch, carrying the initial production satellites, is expected to be the first of many more in a swift deployment campaign using rockets Amazon procured in 2021 and 2022. The company on Tuesday also revealed a slate of three different terminals, or antennas, that will connect customers with its Kuiper satellites in orbit. In a blog post on Tuesday, Amazon detailed its new terminals with photos and pricing.

Standard Customer Terminal: "Project Kuiper's standard customer terminal measures less than 11 inches square and 1 inch thick. It weighs less than five pounds without its mounting bracket. Despite this modest footprint, the device will be one of the most powerful commercially available customer terminals of its size, delivering speeds up to 400 megabits per second (Mbps). Amazon expects to produce these terminals for less than $400 each."

"Most Affordable" Terminal: "A 7-inch square design will be Project Kuiper's smallest and most affordable customer terminal. Weighing just 1 pound and offering speeds up to 100 Mbps, its portability and affordability will create opportunities to serve even more customers around the world. This design will connect residential customers who need an even lower-cost model, as well as government and enterprise customers pursuing applications like ground mobility and internet of things (IoT)."

"Most Capable" Antenna Model: "Project Kuiper's largest, most capable model is designed for enterprise, government, and telecommunications applications that require even more bandwidth. The device measures 19 inches by 30 inches, and will deliver speeds up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps)."

Samsung's Galaxy smartphones now offer "Space Zoom," writes Apple Insider, a feature augmenting 3x and 10x telephoto cameras with digital zoom "aided by Samsung's AI Super Resolution technology."

But the resulting 100X zoom levels "appear to be more a feat of AI trickery than anything else," they conclude, citing an investigation by a Reddit user: That so-called Space Zoom could potentially allow users to photograph the moon, and many do. However, it may be the case that the level of detail in the moon shots may only be higher due to software shenanigans....

The user tested the effect by downloading a high-resolution image of the moon, then downsized it to a 170 by 170-resolution image, and then applied a gaussian blur to obliterate any final details of its surface. They then showed the low-res blurry moon at full screen on their monitor, walked to the other end of their room, zoomed in on the fake celestial body, and took a photograph. After some processing, an image of the moon was produced by the smartphone, but the surface had considerably more detail for the surface than the doctored source. The user reckons Samsung "is leveraging an AI model to put craters and other details on places which were just a blurry mess."

They go further to stress that while super resolution processing uses multiple images to recover otherwise-lost detail, this seems to be something different. It is proposed that this is a case "where you have a specific AI model trained on a set of moon images, in order to recognize the moon and slap on the moon texture on it."
The Reddit user has now posted an update: I photoshopped one moon next to another (to see if one moon would get the AI treatment, while another would not), and managed to coax the AI to do exactly that.... [O]ne moon got the "AI enhancement", while the other one shows what was actually visible to the sensor — a blurry mess....

It's literally adding in detail that weren't there. It's not deconvolution, it's not sharpening, it's not super resolution, it's not "multiple frames or exposures". It's generating data.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares a fresh perspective on how the "pause" announced for building Amazon's HQ2 headquarters could impact the local community: The Falls Church News-Press notes that Amazon's pause announcement came just days after a 12-page glossy mass mailing entitled Capital Region Community Impact Report went out to thousands in the region.

Beginning with a statement from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, the report spelled out "Amazon's philanthropic commitments in the Capital Region," including $32M donated to 150+ local organizations in 2021, $990M+ committed to create and preserve 6,245 affordable housing units. 13,700 people supported by Amazon-funded affordable housing investments and 23,000 students who received food, clothing, school supplies, hygiene items and other urgent support through Amazon's Right Now Needs Fund.

According to the report, the commitments also included benefits to 75,000+ students across 343 schools who received computer science education through the Amazon Future Engineer program, to 166,000+ students who participated in the CodeVA K-12 CS education program during the 2021-22 academic year, the 5.3 million free meals delivered to underserved families in partnership with Northern Virginia food banks, 10,000 meals purchased from local restaurants and donated to support Covid-19 first responders, $350,000 contributed to local community theaters and arts-focused non-profits, to 6,000 students who explored cloud computing solutions at the Wakefield H.S. Think Big in the 2021-22 academic year, the 200,000 children and families from underserved communities who received free access to the National Children's Museum through a $250,000 gift from Amazon, and the 16,700+ students served by Amazon's support for local youth sports leagues.

Not to look an Amazon philanthropy gift horse in the mouth, but should politicians be reliant on Amazon philanthropy to meet their communities' basic needs? Amazon's 2022 income taxes, by the way, were -$3.217B.

"Recently, on a YouTube channel, I said something terrible," confesses a staff writer for the Atlantic. "But I don't know what it was." Whatever it was, it was enough to get the interview demonetized, meaning no ads could be placed against it, and my host received no revenue from it.

"It does start to drive you mad," says Andrew Gold, whose channel, On the Edge, was the place where I committed my unknowable offense. Like many full-time YouTubers, he relies on the Google-owned site's AdSense program, which gives him a cut of revenues from the advertisements inserted before and during his interviews. When launching a new episode, Gold explained to me, "you get a green dollar sign when it's monetizable, and it goes yellow if it's not." Creators can contest these rulings, but that takes time — and most videos receive the majority of their views in the first hours after launch. So it's better to avoid the yellow dollar sign in the first place. If you want to make money off of YouTube, you need to watch what you say....

YouTube operates a three-strike policy for infractions: The first strike is a warning; the second prevents creators from making new posts for a week; and the third (if received within 90 days of the second) gets the channel banned.... Although many types of content may never run afoul of the guidelines...political discussions are subject to the whims of algorithms. Absent enough human moderators to deal with the estimated 500 hours of videos uploaded every minute, YouTube uses artificial intelligence to enforce its guidelines. Bots scan auto-generated transcripts and flag individual words and phrases as problematic, hence the problem with saying heroin. Even though "educational" references to drug use are allowed, the word might snag the AI trip wire, forcing a creator to request a time-consuming review....

[T]alk with everyday creators, and they are more than willing to work inside the rules, which they acknowledge are designed to make YouTube safer and more accurate. They just want to know what those rules are, and to see them applied consistently. As it stands, Gold compared his experience of being impersonally notified of unspecified infractions to working for HAL9000, the computer overlord from 2001: A Space Odyssey. ["They don't tell me if it's Nazis, heroin, or anything," Gold says later. "You're just left wondering what it was."]
The article notes that YouTube's algorithm seems to flag people who are debunking misinformation as misinformation. (One study found that purveyors of controversial content simply stop worrying about YouTube demonetizing their videos, using them to direct viewers instead to their "affiliate" links offering commissions, or to their content on other still-monetized platforms.)

In just the last three months of 2022, YouTube made almost $8 billion in advertising revenue, the article concludes. "There's a very good reason journalism is not as profitable as that: Imagine if YouTube edited its content as diligently as a legacy newspaper or television channel — even quite a sloppy one. Its great river of videos would slow to a trickle."

Politico reports: Governments and businesses have spent two decades rushing to the cloud — trusting some of their most sensitive data to tech giants that promised near-limitless storage, powerful software and the knowhow to keep it safe.

Now the White House worries that the cloud is becoming a huge security vulnerability.

So it's embarking on the nation's first comprehensive plan to regulate the security practices of cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, whose servers provide data storage and computing power for customers ranging from mom-and-pop businesses to the Pentagon and CIA.... Among other steps, the Biden administration recently said it will require cloud providers to verify the identity of their users to prevent foreign hackers from renting space on U.S. cloud servers (implementing an idea first introduced in a Trump administration executive order). And last week the administration warned in its national cybersecurity strategy that more cloud regulations are coming — saying it plans to identify and close regulatory gaps over the industry....

So far, cloud providers have haven't done enough to prevent criminal and nation-state hackers from abusing their services to stage attacks within the U.S., officials argued, pointing in particular to the 2020 SolarWinds espionage campaign, in which Russian spooks avoided detection in part by renting servers from Amazon and GoDaddy. For months, they used those to slip unnoticed into at least nine federal agencies and 100 companies. That risk is only growing, said Rob Knake, the deputy national cyber director for strategy and budget. Foreign hackers have become more adept at "spinning up and rapidly spinning down" new servers, he said — in effect, moving so quickly from one rented service to the next that new leads dry up for U.S. law enforcement faster than it can trace them down.

On top of that, U.S. officials express significant frustration that cloud providers often up-charge customers to add security protections — both taking advantage of the need for such measures and leaving a security hole when companies decide not to spend the extra money. That practice complicated the federal investigations into the SolarWinds attack, because the agencies that fell victim to the Russian hacking campaign had not paid extra for Microsoft's enhanced data-logging features.... Part of what makes that difficult is that neither the government nor companies using cloud providers fully know what security protections cloud providers have in place. In a study last month on the U.S. financial sector's use of cloud services, the Treasury Department found that cloud companies provided "insufficient transparency to support due diligence and monitoring" and U.S. banks could not "fully understand the risks associated with cloud services."

$4,800 buys you a two-day "immersive" experience on the Star Wars-themed "Galactic Starcruiser" at Disney World — a pseudo cruise ship in space.

But one year after it opened, Disney is "cutting back" some of its bookings, reports SFGate: Earlier this year, it began offering its first sizable discounts to the general public. Now, the Starcruiser booking calendar shows only two voyages per week will be available for most of October, November and December. Only Thanksgiving week and Christmas week are offering three voyages....

"Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser is one of the most ambitious, innovative projects we've ever brought to life and is unlike anything we've done before — it continues to be among our highest-rated guest experiences due to its immersive environment and incredible service provided by our stellar crew," a Disney spokesperson told SFGATE. "We learned a lot from our guests during the first year of operation and have made some adjustments along the way to continue delivering an unforgettable experience for everyone who visits."

"Based on initial data review, vehicle is healthy," Relativity Space tweeted today. "More info to follow on cause of aborts today. Thanks for playing."

Remaining back on the launchpad is the largest 3D printed object ever to exist. And they're still hoping to launch it into space.

They'd planned a launch this morning from Cape Canaveral, Florida of a 110-foot rocket (33.5 meters) on a mission they're calling GLHF — "Good Luck, Have Fun".

The rocket's makers — California-based Relativity Space — call it "the world's first 3D printed rocket." A full 85% of the rocket's weight comes from 3D printed parts, explains Wired, and "only the computing system, electronics, and readily available parts like fasteners were not." Named Terran 1, the 7.5-foot-wide rocket (2.2 meters) inaugurates the company's ambitious plans for 3D printing in space: Relativity Space wants to use Terran 1 to (comparatively) cheaply lift satellites for other companies and NASA into Earth orbit. It also plans to construct Terran R, a larger, more powerful, fully reusable rocket that the company hopes will compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9, which has a smaller payload capacity and only reuses the rocket's first stage. In late 2024, Relativity plans to test using Terran R to launch payloads to Mars; another startup, Impulse Space, will provide the lander.
From the company's web site: Like its structure, all Relativity engines are 3D printed and use liquid oxygen and liquid natural gas, which are not only the best for rocket propulsion, but also for reusability, and the easiest to eventually transition to methane on Mars.
The tagline for the company's Twitter feed says they're "Building humanity's multiplanetary future." And excitement is running high, reports Spaceflight Now" "There are a number of firsts here potentially on this rocket," said Josh Brost, vice president of revenue operations at Relativity Space....

"Hard to believe the day is nearly here to launch Terran 1, our first rocket!" Tim Ellis, co-founder and CEO of Relativity Space tweeted Tuesday....

The company now boasts some 1,000 employees, a million-square-foot headquarters and factory in Long Beach, California, and $1.3 billion in venture capital and equity fundraising, including an early $500,000 investment from billionaire Mark Cuban. In 2021, the company reached a valuation of $4.2 billion before launching any rockets....

"No new company has ever had their liquid rocket make it to space on their first attempt," Brost, also a former engineer and manager at SpaceX, told Spaceflight Now in a pre-launch interview. "So if everything goes incredibly well, and we achieve orbit on our first launch ... that would be a remarkable milestone for us, which we would be, of course, over the moon excited about. But that doesn't define success for us."
Wired adds that they're not the only company working on space-related 3D printing: Australia's Fleet Space has already been producing lightweight, 3D-printed radio frequency antennas for satellites. Next year, using printers half the size of a bus, they plan to create a satellite constellation called Alpha that will be entirely 3D-printed.... Flavia Tata Nardini, the company's CEO, believes space-based 3D printing is coming next. "In my ideal future, in 10 to 15 years, I won't have to launch satellites from here; I can build them up there."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When you first start messing with the command line, it can feel like there's an impermeable wall between the local space you're messing around in and the greater Internet. On your side, you've got your commands and files, and beyond the wall, there are servers, images, APIs, webpages, and more bits of useful, ever-changing data. One of the most popular ways through that wall has been cURL, or "client URL," which turns 25 this month.

The cURL tool started as a way for programmer Daniel Stenberg to let Internet Chat Relay users quickly fetch currency exchange rates while still inside their chat window. As detailed in an archived history of the project, it was originally built off an existing command-line tool, httpget, built by Rafael Sagula. A 1.0 version was released in 1997, then changed names to urlget by 2.0, as it had added in GOPHER, FTP, and other protocols. By 1998, the tool could upload as well as download, and so version 4.0 was named cURL. Over the next few years, cURL grew to encompass nearly every Internet protocol, work with certificates and encryption, offer bindings for more than 50 languages, and be included in most Linux distributions and other systems. The cURL project now encompasses both the command-line command itself and the libcurl library. In 2020, the project's history estimated the command and library had been installed in more than 10 billion instances worldwide.

How do you celebrate a piece of indispensable Internet architecture turning 25? Stenberg plans to host a "Zoom birthday party" at 17:00 UTC time on March 20. Double-check that time in your area: "It is within this weird period between [when] the US has switched to daylight saving time while Europe has not yet switched," Stenberg writes on his blog. Stenberg plans to sip on a 25-year Bowmore Islay single-malt Scotch, while presenting the project's history and future plans while taking questions. (A link to the Zoom call will be added to Stenberg's blog post closer to March 20.)

Twitter's decline is paving the way for other platforms to build next-generation replacements. And now the biggest player in the game is getting involved: Meta is in the early stages of building a dedicated app for people to post text-based updates. From a report: "We're exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates," the company told Platformer exclusively in an email. "We believe there's an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests." News that Meta has been exploring a text-based network was first reported Thursday by MoneyControl. The app is codenamed P92 and will allow users to log in through their existing Instagram credentials, the outlet reported.

Details about the project are scant. The product is still in its earliest stages, sources said, and there is no time frame for it being released. But legal and regulatory teams have already started to investigate potential privacy concerns around the app so they can be addressed before launch, we're told. Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, is taking the lead on the project, sources said. The most remarkable aspect of the project is that Meta plans for the network to be decentralized. While the company would not elaborate beyond its statement, in a decentralized network individual users are typically able to set up their own, independent servers and set server-specific rules for how content is moderated. Building a decentralized network could also give Meta the opportunity for its new app to interoperate with other social products -- a previously unheard-of gesture from a company known for building some of the most lucrative walled gardens in the industry's history.

A newly discovered asteroid roughly the size of an Olympic swimming pool has a "small chance" of colliding with Earth in 23 years, with a potential impact on Valentine's Day in 2046, according to NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. From a report: The asteroid has a 1 in 625 chance of striking Earth, based on data projections from the European Space Agency, though NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Sentry system calculated the odds closer to 1 in 560. The latter tracks potential collisions with celestial objects. But the space rock -- named 2023 DW -- is the only object on NASA's risk list that ranks 1 out of 10 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale, a metric for categorizing the projected risk of an object colliding with Earth. All other objects rank at 0 on the Torino scale.

NASA officials have warned that the odds of impact could be dramatically altered as more observations of 2023 DW are collected and additional analysis is performed. It may be a few days before new data can be collected because of the asteroid's proximity to the moon [...]. The last full moon was two days ago, and it still appears bright and large in the sky, likely obscuring 2023 DW from immediate observation.

The asteroid measures about 160 feet (about 50 meters) in diameter, according to NASA data. As 2023 DW orbits the sun, it has 10 predicted close approaches to Earth, with the nearest landing on February 14, 2046, and nine others between 2047 and 2054. The closest the asteroid is expected to travel to Earth is about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), NASA's Eyes on Asteroids website notes. The space rock was first spotted in our skies on February 2. It's traveling about 15.5 miles per second (25 kilometers per second) at a distance of more than 11 million miles (18 million kilometers) from Earth, completing one loop around the sun every 271 days.

Reach, the owner of the UK's Daily Mirror and Daily Express tabloids among other newspapers, has started publishing articles with the help of AI software on one of its regional websites as it scrambles to cut costs amid slipping advertising revenues. The Register reports: Three stories written with the help of machine-learning tools were published on InYourArea.co.uk, which produces feeds of nearby goings-on in Blighty. One piece, titled Seven Things to do in Newport, is a listicle pulling together information on places and activities available in the eponymous sunny Welsh resort city. Reach CEO Jim Mullen said the machine-written articles are checked and approved by human editors before they're published online.

"We produced our first AI content in the last ten days, but this is led by editorial," he said, according to The Guardian. "It was all AI-produced, but the data was obviously put together by a journalist, and whether it was good enough to publish was decided by an editor." "There are loads of ethics [issues] around AI and journalistic content," Mullen admitted. "The way I look at it, we produce lots of content based on actual data. It can be put together in a well-read [piece] that I think AI can do. We are trying to apply it to areas we already get traffic to allow journalists to focus on content that editors want written."

Mullen's comments have been questioned by journalists, however, given that Reach announced plans to slash hundreds of jobs in January. The National Union of Journalists said 102 editorial positions would be cut, putting 253 journalists at risk, whilst 180 vacancies would be withdrawn.

The launch of Japan's H3 rocket on Tuesday morning, local time in Tanegashima, failed after the vehicle's second-stage engine did not ignite. From a report: In a terse statement on the failure, Japanese space agency JAXA said, "A destruct command has been transmitted to H3 around 10:52 am (Japan Standard Time), because there was no possibility of achieving the mission. We are confirming the situation." The Japanese space agency, in concert with the rocket's manufacturer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has spent about $1.5 billion developing the H3 rocket over the last decade. Much of the challenge in building the new rocket involved development of a new LE-9 engine, which is fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, to power the first stage. This appeared to perform flawlessly. The second-stage engine that failed, the LE-5B, was a more established engine.

The country has sought to increase its share of the commercial launch market by building a lower-cost alternative to its older H2-A vehicle to more effectively compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster. Mitsubishi's goal was to sell the H3 at $51 million per launch in its base configuration. This would allow the company to supplement its launches of institutional missions for the Japanese government with commercial satellites. Tuesday's debut flight of the H3 rocket carried the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-3 for the Japanese government. It was lost. Japanese officials expressed dissatisfaction after the rocket's failure. Japan's minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology Science, Keiko Nagaoka, said the launch failure was "extremely regrettable." She added that a task force would work with JAXA to "promptly and thoroughly" determine what caused the failure.

NASA's Orion spacecraft performed better than expected on its first deep-space flight despite experiencing unpredicted loss of its heat shield material. Space.com reports: During Tuesday's call, NASA program managers revealed that Orion's heat shield did not perform as expected, losing more material than the agency had planned for. Nevertheless, NASA leadership is confident that everything will be ready for the crewed around-the-moon flight of Artemis 2, which is planned for next year. Howard Hu, manager of NASA's Orion Program, lauded the crew module's performance during the test flight, noting that NASA was able to accomplish 161 overall test objectives planned for the mission, even adding an additional 21 during the flight based on the spacecraft's performance.

"We also accomplished what our number one objective was, which is returning the crew module back to Earth safely from 24,500 miles per hour to a landing about 16 miles per hour when it touched down, and we were able to land within 2.4 miles of our target," Hu said during Tuesday's teleconference. "Our requirement was 6.2 miles. So, really great performance as we were able to return back from the moon." "Some of the expected char material that we would expect coming back home ablated away differently than what our computer models and what our ground testing predicted," Hu said. "So we had more liberation of the charred material during reentry before we landed than we had expected."

Hu explained that NASA teams are investigating a wide range of data related to the performance of Orion's heat shield, including images and videos of reentry, onboard sensor readings, and even X-ray images of sample materials taken from the shield. "Overall, there's a lot of work to be done in this investigation going forward," Hu said. "We are just starting that effort because we've just gotten together all those pieces of information. Those samples, the videos, images, and the data from the spacecraft itself and correlated them together. And now we're assessing that data and moving forward with that assessment." Despite the heat shield issue, NASA says they feel confident that the crewed Artemis 2 mission will be able to launch on schedule in 2024.

"NASA is currently aiming to launch Artemis 2 in November 2024," adds Space.com. "The mission will send a crew of astronauts on an eight-day mission around the moon and back to test Orion's performance, crew interfaces, and guidance and navigation systems."

Here's an interesting bit of news out of Mobile World Congress: Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has been certified as the "world's first commercially deployable iSIM (Integrated SIM)." ArsTechnica: What the heck is an iSIM? Didn't we just go through a SIM card transition with eSIM? We did, but iSIM is better than eSIM. We'll explain, but the short answer is that iSIM is the next step in the continual march to reduce the size of SIM cards. [...] eSIMs are still a chip taking up space on your motherboard, and that's not ideal if you want to squeeze every square millimeter of space out of a phone. The next shrinking step is iSIM -- an Integrated Subscriber Identity Module. Rather than a chip on the motherboard, iSIMs are integrated directly onto the SoC. SoC (system on a chip) integration is the technology that makes smartphones possible. Instead of a thousand little chips for things like the CPU, GPU, RAM, modem, and a bunch of other things, everything gets packed into one single do-everything piece of silicon.

Individual chips require more space and power thanks to having to make motherboard traces to connect everything and having to deal with chip packages. Building everything in one chip, with the tiniest transistors you can muster, is the cheapest and most space-efficient and power-efficient way to do things, and now SIM cards are going to disappear into that big block of stuff. iSIMs will be measured in fractions of a millimeter, and as part of the SoC, they will continually shrink every year as chip process nodes hit ever-smaller nm measurements. It sounds like this is the endgame for SIM technology, and besides helping out phones, will be great for evermore space-constrained devices like smartwatches.

Unprecedented access to space is leading to all sorts of cool new ideas, including the prospect of storing data on the lunar surface. Cloud computing startup Lonestar Data Holdings announced the results of its latest funding round, taking it one step closer to this very goal. Gizmodo reports: The Florida-based company raised $5 million in seed funding to establish lunar data centers, Lonestar announced in a press release on Monday. Lonestar wants to build a series of data centers on the Moon and establish a viable platform for data storage and edge processing (i.e. the practice of processing data near the source, as a means to reduce latency and improve bandwidth) on the lunar surface. "Data is the greatest currency created by the human race," Chris Stott, founder of Lonestar, said in an April 2022 statement. "We are dependent upon it for nearly everything we do and it is too important to us as a species to store in Earth's ever more fragile biosphere. Earth's largest satellite, our Moon, represents the ideal place to safely store our future."

In December 2021, Lonestar successfully ran a test of its data center on board the International Space Station. The company is now ready to launch a small data center box to the lunar surface later this year as part of Intuitive Machines's second lunar mission, IM-2 (the company's first mission, IM-1, is expected to launch in June). Intuitive Machines is receiving funding from NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program for delivering research projects to the Moon as part of the space agency's Artemis program. The lunar data centers will initially be geared towards remote data storage and disaster recovery, allowing companies to back up their data and store it on the Moon. In addition, the data centers could assist with both commercial and private ventures to the lunar environment.

The miniature data center weighs about 2 pounds (1 kilogram) and has a capacity of 16 terabytes, Stott told SpaceNews. He said the first data center will draw power and communications from the lander, but the ones that will follow (pending its success) will be standalone data centers that the company hopes to deploy on the lunar surface by 2026. The test is only supposed to last for the duration of the IM-2 mission, which is expected to be around 11-14 days, an Intuitive Machines spokesperson told SpaceNews.

Google-owned Fitbit is removing several community-focused features on March 27, including Challenges and open groups. Christine Persaud writes via XDA Developers reports: For me, challenges were one of Fitbit's main strengths. You could strap a fitness tracker or smartwatch to your wrist, set up an account, and chances are at least a handful of your contacts were also Fitbit users. Then, you could add them as friends to compete and compare your progress. This seems like an insignificant "nice to have" feature, but the motivation it provides is precisely the aim of wearing a fitness tracker in the first place. And without open groups, you wouldn't have the opportunity to get to know like-minded users from around the world.

This decision eliminates one of the platform's best features: a sense of community. Reportedly, more than 31 million people use Fitbit at least once a week. That's a staggering number and a group of customers ripe for creating and maintaining an active community. At a time when the market is flooded with competing fitness tracker and smartwatch brands, it has become increasingly difficult to stand out. According to Statista, Fitbit has been leading the wearables space since 2014, accounting for almost half the worldwide market share at 45%. The company's solid grasp on the market (though it now faces stiff competition from the likes of Apple, Garmin, and others) is partly because of the unique Challenges and groups. While other companies, like Apple, have a version of Challenges, they're not as robust as what Fitbit supports. "Nonetheless, for anyone new to the market looking for a fitness tracker or smartwatch that can do it all and connect them to a wealth of information and a community of people, this news makes Fitbit a less appealing platform to consider," adds Persaud. "All we can do is hope for bigger and better things to come with Google integration in the future."

Formerly known as LinuxBIOS, coreboot is defined by Wikipedia as "a software project aimed at replacing proprietary firmware (BIOS or UEFI) found in most computers with a lightweight firmware."

Phoronix is wondering if there's about to be a big announcement from AMD: AMD dropped a juicy tid-bit of information to be announced next month with "openSIL" [an open-source AMD x86 silicon initialization library], complete with AMD Coreboot support....

While about a decade ago AMD was big into Coreboot and at the time committed to it for future hardware platforms (2011: AMD To Support Coreboot On All Future CPUs) [and] open-source AGESA at the time did a lot of enabling around it, that work had died off. In more recent years, AMD's Coreboot contributions have largely been limited to select consumer APU/SoC platforms for Google Chromebook use. But issues around closing up the AGESA as well as concerns with the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP) have diminished open-source firmware hopes in recent years....

For the Open Compute Project Regional Summit in Prague, there is a new entry added with a title of OSF on AMD — Enabled by openSIL (yes, folks, OSF as in "Open-Source Firmware").... [H]opefully this will prove to be a monumental shift for open-source firmware in the HPC server space.
From the talk's description: openSIL (AMD open-source x86 Silicon Initialization Library) offers the versatility, scalability, and light weight interface to allow for ease of integration with open-source and/or proprietary host boot solutions such as coreboot, UEFI and others and adds major flexibility to the overall platform design.

In other words, this library-based solution simply allows a platform integrator to scale from feature rich solutions such as UEFI to slim, lightweight, and secure solutions such as coreboot.
The description promises the talk will include demonstrations "highlighting system bring-up using openSIL integrated with coreboot and UEFI Host Firmware stacks on AMD's Genoa based platforms."

An anonymous readers this surprising story from Mashable: When a Russian spaceship docked as a lifeboat for three stranded men at the International Space Station in February, one may have wondered if Sergei Krikalev, heading the rescue mission, felt any deja vu.

If that name doesn't ring a bell, he's also sometimes known as "the last Soviet" for his more than 311 days spent in space as the Soviet Union collapsed 250 miles beneath him in 1991. He was only meant to be at the Mir station for five months. Instead, he remained for close to a year, never abandoning the outpost.

Today, Krikalev, the former cosmonaut, is the executive director of human spaceflight for the Russian space agency. That means it's on his watch to make sure NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin get back home safely after their ship sprang a leak at the station in December 2022. The three marooned crew members were supposed to return this month. But their mission will now stretch for a year, until a new crew arrives to relieve them on a separate spacecraft in six months.

Krikalev's story of being stranded in space is now getting a perhaps overdue spotlight with a new podcast series called "The Last Soviet." And it's being told by another cosmonaut, Lance Bass.... Few may remember that boy-band member Bass almost made it to space on a Soyuz spacecraft himself. In 2002, he spent about six months, off and on, training in Star City, Russia, and was certified by Russia and NASA to fly a mission to the space station.

"Cities across the nation face a dilemma," writes the Washington Post's editoral board," warning local leaders to respond to "the urgency and scale of the downtown crisis in many major metro areas..."

"Downtown office buildings are empty as workers prefer to stay home." Nearly all local leaders agree part of the solution is an office-to-apartment conversion boom. Cities have started rolling out tax incentives to encourage developers to begin this transformation. This strategy is straight out of the playbook that revived center city Philadelphia and Lower Manhattan in the past quarter century. But there's a problem: City leaders aren't doing enough...

Consider the nation's capital city. Downtown D.C. is more than 90 percent commercial buildings. The vibrancy and workers are largely gone. Crime and grime are increasing, while property tax revenue is quickly decreasing as building values plummet. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has put out an ambitious "Comeback Plan" that calls for 15,000 new residents living downtown by 2028. To make that a reality, the city needs developers to convert roughly 7 million square feet of office space to apartments and condos. Her team estimates about 1 million square feet is on track for conversion so far. There's a long way to go. The situation is similar in Chicago, San Francisco, New York and Atlanta, among other cities....

The longer cities wait to get conversions underway, the more tax values drop and crime goes up, and the more people see no value in living in the heart of the city — or even visiting. One way or another, cities are going to pay. D.C. is already staring at $464 million in lower revenue for 2024 to 2026 mainly due to lower commercial property taxes downtown. San Francisco is facing a $728 million shortfall over the next two fiscal years for similar reasons. Buildings constructed in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s are quickly becoming distressed. It's far better to invest now than to spend years overseeing stagnation and decline. As D.C.'s Chief Financial Officer Glen Lee warned, this is "a serious long-term risk to the District's economy and its tax base."

The sooner these buildings can convert to residential, the sooner the city can generate some tax revenue again from an area that once brought in hefty commercial property revenue. Cities will have to rely much more on residential income tax revenue from downtowns.

The final season of Star Trek: Picard features the return of the Klingon Worf, reports Polygon, calling it "the chance to give one of sci-fi's most beloved supporting characters something that's usually reserved only for Captains and Admirals: a glorious third act."

Interestingly, back in 1987 Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had "hoped to avoid relying on familiar alien antagonists" when creating the first Star Trek TV sequel in 1987. So after a last-minute addition, "the early development of the character was left almost entirely in the hands of Dorn, then best known for a supporting role on the lighthearted police drama CHiPs." "They really didn't have a bible for Worf at all," says Dorn of those early episodes. "In fact, one of the first things I did was, I asked the producers, 'What do you want from this guy? You've just handed me a piece of paper that says Worf on it.'" With Roddenberry's blessing, Dorn set out making the character his own, giving Worf the kind of personal investment and attachment that only an actor can provide. "I decided to make the guy the opposite of everybody else on the show. You know, everyone else, their attitudes were great, and they're out there in space, relationships are forming. And after every mission they were like, Wasn't that fantastic? I didn't say anything to anybody, I just made him this gruff and surly character on the bridge. No smiles, no joking around."

It didn't take the show's producers long to realize that Dorn's gruff, joyless performance could effectively turn any bit of throwaway dialogue into a laugh line....

Alongside his role as the show's unlikely comic relief, however, Worf developed into one of Star Trek's most complicated protagonists. Roddenberry mandated that the show's human characters had evolved beyond the sorts of interpersonal conflicts that typically drive television dramas, but Worf, an alien, was permitted to be contrarian, hot-tempered, and even malicious.... He strictly adheres to a code of honor that does not totally overlap with that of his peers.... Yet, however many times "real" Klingon conduct clashes with his values, Worf never allows this to pollute his own sense of honor. He remains unfailingly truthful, loyal, and brave. And, over the years, other Klingons take notice of this and grow to admire and emulate him....

Dorn — along with the rest of the Next Gen ensemble — has once again been called upon to revitalize a Star Trek spinoff. The third season of Star Trek: Picard reintroduces us to Worf as a wise old master, so confident in his ability to defeat his foes in combat that he rarely needs to unsheathe this weapon. Dorn has imagined the past 20 years of his character's life in detail, taking inspiration from a source not entirely disconnected from Star Trek: the films of Quentin Tarantino. Appropriately, Dorn has patterned this version of Worf after a character from a film that opens with an old Klingon proverb: Kill Bill.

"One of the characters was Pai Mei, this martial arts killer," says Dorn. "He's gone so far in the martial arts, the next step is — he can defend himself and kill with a sword, but he can also do it with his bare hands. And with that comes calm, and the ability to know that sometimes you don't have to kill. That's how he's grown in the past 20 years. Now he can dodge ray guns...."

One way or another, the actor looks back at his untouchable tenure as Starfleet's greatest warrior with warmth and appreciation.
And speaking of appreciation, this video shows Dorn out of his Klingon makeup, joining with castmember Brent Spiner to recall a fondly-remembered prank that they'd played on Patrick Stewart (who was directing the episode).