It wasn’t space debris that struck a United Airlines plane—it was a weather balloon

WindBorne says its balloons are compliant with all applicable airspace regulations. 

The mysterious impact of a United Airlines aircraft in flight last week has sparked plenty of theories as to its cause, from space debris to high-flying birds.

However the question of what happened to flight 1093, and its severely damaged front window, appears to be answered in the form of a weather balloon.

“I think this was a WindBorne balloon,” Kai Marshland, co-founder of the weather prediction company WindBorne Systems, told Ars in an email on Monday evening. “We learned about UA1093 and the potential that it was related to one of our balloons at 11 pm PT on Sunday and immediately looked into it. At 6 am PT, we sent our preliminary investigation to both NTSB and FAA, and are working with both of them to investigate further.”

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NSO permanently barred from targeting WhatsApp users with Pegasus spyware

Ruling holds that defeating end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp harms Meta’s business.

A federal judge has ordered spyware maker NSO to stop using its Pegasus app to target or infect users of WhatsApp.

The ruling, issued Friday by Phyllis J. Hamilton of of the US District Court of the District of Northern California, grants a permanent injunction sought by WhatsApp owner Meta in a case it brought against NSO in 2019. The lawsuit alleged that Meta caught NSO trying to surreptitiously infect about 1,400 mobile phones—many belonging to attorneys, journalists, human-rights activists, political dissidents, diplomats, and senior foreign government officials—with Pegasus. As part of the campaign, NSO created fake WhatsApp accounts and targeted Meta infrastructure. The suit sought monetary awards and an injunction against the practice.

Setting a precedent

Friday’s ruling ordered NSO to permanently cease targeting WhatsApp users, attempting to infect their devices, or intercepted WhatsApp messages, which are end-to-end encrypted using the open source Signal Protocol. Hamilton also ruled that NSO must delete any data it obtained when targeting the WhatsApp users.

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NASA’s acting leader seeks to keep his job with new lunar lander announcement

“The president wants to make sure we beat the Chinese.”

NASA acting administrator Sean Duffy made two television appearances on Monday morning in which he shook up the space agency’s plans to return humans to the Moon.

Speaking on Fox News, where the secretary of transportation frequently appears in his acting role as NASA chief, Duffy said SpaceX has fallen behind in its efforts to develop the Starship vehicle as a lunar lander. Duffy also indirectly acknowledged that NASA’s projected target of a 2027 crewed lunar landing is no longer achievable. Accordingly, he said he intended to expand the competition to develop a lander capable of carrying humans down to the Moon from lunar orbit and back.

“They’re behind schedule, and so the President wants to make sure we beat the Chinese,” Duffy said of SpaceX. “He wants to get there in his term. So I’m in the process of opening that contract up. I think we’ll see companies like Blue [Origin] get involved, and maybe others. We’re going to have a space race in regard to American companies competing to see who can actually lead us back to the Moon first.”

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MSI launches Cubi Z AI 8M mini PC with AMD Hawk Point mini PC

The MSI Cubi Z AI 8M is a 136 x 132 x 50mm (5.4″ x 5.2″ x 2″) computer with support for up to 64GB of DDR5-5600 memory, an M.2 2280 slot for a PCIe 4.0 x4  SSD, and plenty of I/O features including dual 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports, two…

The MSI Cubi Z AI 8M is a 136 x 132 x 50mm (5.4″ x 5.2″ x 2″) computer with support for up to 64GB of DDR5-5600 memory, an M.2 2280 slot for a PCIe 4.0 x4  SSD, and plenty of I/O features including dual 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports, two HDMI ports, and seven USB ports. […]

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