Month: February 2020

Enlarge / Starliner touches down in December. (credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)

On Friday during a detailed, 75-minute briefing with reporters, a key Boeing spaceflight official sought to be as clear as possible about the company's troubles with its Starliner spacecraft.

After an uncrewed test flight in December of the spacecraft, Boeing "learned some hard lessons," said John Mulholland, a vice president who manages the company's commercial crew program. The December mission landed safely but suffered two serious software problems. Now, Mulholland said, Boeing will work hard to rebuild trust between itself and the vehicle's customer, NASA. During the last decade, NASA has paid Boeing a total of $4.8 billion to develop a safe capsule to fly US astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

At the outset of the briefing, Mulholland sought to provide information about the vehicle's performance, including its life support systems, heat shield, guidance, and navigation. He noted that there were relatively few issues discovered. However, when he invited questions from reporters, the focus quickly turned to software. In particular, Mulholland was asked several times how the company made decisions on procedures for testing flight software before the mission—which led to the two mistakes.

Freeman Dyson, a physicist whose interests often took him to the edge of science fiction, has died at the age of 96. Dyson is probably best known for his idea of eponymous spheres that would allow civilizations to capture all the energy radiating off a star. But his contributions ranged from fundamental physics to the practicalities of using nuclear weapons for war and peace. And he remained intellectually active into his 90s, although he wandered into the wrong side of science when it came to climate change.

Degrees? Who needs 'em?

It's difficult to find anything that summarizes a career so broad, but a sense of his intellectual energy comes from his educational history. Dyson was a graduate student in physics when he managed to unify two competing ideas about quantum electrodynamics, placing an entire field on a solid theoretical foundation. Rather than writing that up as his thesis, he simply moved on to other interests. He didn't get a doctorate until the honorary ones started arriving later in his career. His contributions were considered so important that he kept getting faculty jobs regardless.

Freeman Dyson at the introduction of Breakthrough Starshot, an idea with a sci-fi aura that's based on well-understood physics. (credit: Gary Gershoff / Getty Images)

That came after a fairly conventional start to his education: an undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge. Like many other scientists at the time, his career was interrupted by World War II, with Dyson working at the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command, evaluating data from completed missions and finding ways of getting more out of the nation's aircraft. After the war, he returned to Cambridge to finish his degree, then started in a PhD program at Cornell University in the US.

A traumatized woman escapes her abusive relationship, only to find she is being stalked by an unseen entity in The Invisible Man, (very) loosely based on the H.G. Wells science fiction novel. It's less a direct adaption than a reinvention, written and directed by Leigh Whannell, best known for the Saw and Insidious horror franchises. The Invisible Man is horror in the best sense of the word, working on multiple levels and firmly anchored by star Elisabeth Moss's intensely emotional, yet nuanced performance.

(Some spoilers below.)

First serialized and then published as a book in 1897, the novel tells the story of a scientist named Griffin, whose research into optics leads him to invent a means of turning himself invisible with a serum that chemically alters his body's refractive index to match that of air. Wells cited Plato's Republic as one of his influences, notably a legend involving a magic ring that renders a man invisible, which Plato used to explore whether a person would behave morally if there were no repercussions for bad behavior.

Enlarge (credit: Spencer Whalen | EyeEm | Getty Images)

Secretive startup Clearview AI distributes an apparently very powerful facial recognition tool that matches anyone against an enormous database of photos—it claims more than 3 billion—scraped from basically every major US platform on the Internet. A leaked list now reveals that more than 2,200 government agencies and private businesses have tried the service.

Clearview, which first came to light courtesy of a New York Times report from January, claims to have about 600 customers, all in law enforcement. The company has repeatedly refused to make a client list public, however, and previous reports find that at least some of its marketing claims are significantly exaggerated.

Earlier this week, Clearview disclosed that its client list and some information about searches those customers have run was lost in a data breach. Reporters at BuzzFeed ended up with access to a copy and found far more in it than Clearview has ever admitted.

Enlarge / Huawei's logo at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona in November 2019. (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

The US House and Senate approved legislation to create a $1 billion fund that will help small telecom providers remove and replace Huawei and ZTE networking equipment.

The bill, which awaits President Trump's signature, also prohibits telcos from using Federal Communications Commission funding to purchase Huawei or ZTE equipment. But the Congressional action is largely duplicative, as the FCC had already approved a ban.

The Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act was approved in voice votes by the House in December and by the Senate yesterday. It doesn't mention Huawei or ZTE by name but says the FCC must produce a list of equipment providers "posing national security risks" and prohibits ISPs and phone companies from using FCC funding to purchase, rent, lease, or maintain equipment and services made by those companies.