Month: January 2020

Enlarge / An earlier image from Firefly showing a nighttime stage test at its Briggs Test Stand in Central Texas. (credit: Firefly Aerospace)

On Wednesday evening, at Firefly Aerospace's test site about an hour north of Austin in Central Texas, some sort of anomaly occurred. The Burnet County Sheriff's Office reported that the incident took place at 6:24pm CT (00:24 UTC, Thursday), and that officers had called for evacuations of residences within one mile of the test site.

Earlier in the evening, in a subsequently deleted tweet, the company stated that it was loading liquid oxygen onto the rocket and about to attempt a qualification hot fire test of the first stage of its Alpha booster. This rocket is powered by four Reaver engines and has a reported capacity of 1 metric ton to low-Earth orbit. Firefly has been working toward the inaugural launch of the rocket, from Vandenberg Air Force Base, in April.

Later Wednesday night, the company issued a statement about the test, noting that no one had been hurt.

Enlarge / Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrats from New York, during a news conference on the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund in Washington, DC, on Thursday, July 18, 2019. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The Federal Communications Commission has unfairly shut New York state out of a planned $20.4 billion broadband-funding program, US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) wrote in a letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai last week.

ISPs in 48 states are eligible for funding in the FCC rural-broadband program, which will distribute the money over 10 years to providers that expand their networks to new homes and businesses. The FCC said it blocked New York and Alaska from Phase I of the program "because of previously established programs to fund rural broadband in these states." (Phase I will distribute $16 billion of the $20.4 billion.)

The FCC previously established a separate funding program for Alaska with $1.5 billion over 10 years. But Schumer and Gillibrand say New York has only gotten its fair share of nationwide FCC programs, rather than something extra.

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  Of all the characters to appear in the animated Star Wars series, Ahsoka Tano (voiced by Ashley Eckstein) has been the standout. [credit: Disney ]

Back in 2018, Lucasfilm surprised and delighted attendees at that year's ComicCon with the news that it would return to Star Wars: The Clone Wars. On Wednesday it released a new trailer for the animated series' final season, which airs on the Disney+ streaming service beginning February 21. Set before Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, the 12-episode season will (hopefully) wrap up the adventures of fan-favorite Jedi Ahsoka Tano, Anakin Skywalker's Padawan learner.

Like most of my colleagues, signing up for Disney+ wasn't a particularly hard decision; the eight-part series The Mandalorian has been more than worth the price of entry. But Disney wants people like me to keep sending it $6.99 a month, and that means fresh content, no matter how totes adorbs we all find Baby Yoda.

In fact, I'm currently in the middle of rewatching the first seven seasons of The Clone Wars, except this time in actual chronological order rather than the inexplicable "let's just show episodes at random because who cares it's just a cartoon" order that Cartoon Network chose when airing them between 2008 and 2013. (Note: the first seven series are still arranged in that bizarre mashup on Disney+, but this handy page over at starwars.com will help you straighten it out.)

Enlarge (credit: Ben Miller)

When Apple introduced powerful anti-tracking protections to Safari in 2017, advertisers banded together to say they were “deeply concerned” it would sabotage ad-supported content. Now, there’s new information showing that Safari users had good reason for unease as well.

Known as Intelligent Tracking Prevention, the mechanism uses machine learning to classify which websites are allowed to use browser cookies or scripts hosted on third-party domains to track users. Classifications are based on the specific browsing patterns of each end user. Sites that end users intentionally visit are permitted to do cross-site tracking. Sites that users don’t actively visit (but are accessed through tracking scripts) are restricted, either by automatically removing the cookies they set or truncating referrer headers to include only the domain, rather than the entire URL.

A paper published on Wednesday by researchers from Google said this protection came at considerable risk to the privacy end users. Because the list of restricted sites is based on users’ individual browsing patterns, Intelligent Tracking Prevention—commonly abbreviated as ITP—introduces settings into Safari that can be modified and detected by any page on the Internet. The paper said websites have been able to use this capability for a host of attacks, including: