Month: February 2020

Enlarge / William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, speaks in 2013. (credit: NASA)

SpaceX has confirmed that NASA's former chief of human spaceflight, William Gerstenmaier, has joined the company as a consultant as it prepares to launch astronauts for the first time.

This is a consequential hire for SpaceX—it is difficult to overstate the influence Gerstenmaier has over human spaceflight both in the United States and abroad. He led NASA's space shuttle, International Space Station, commercial crew, and exploration programs for more than a decade.

He immediately brings credibility to the company's safety culture. Former Space Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale, who now chairs the human spaceflight committee of NASA's Advisory Council, told Ars last summer, "Bill was recognized by everybody as being technically well-grounded and very astute. He was known to listen carefully and to make his judgments based on good technical reasons."

Internet denizens of a certain age will recall with fondness the 3D animated Dancing Baby (aka "Baby Cha-Cha" and "the Oogachacka Baby") that went viral in 1996. Sure, the rendering was crude by today's standards and—it must be said—a little creepy, but in many ways, the Dancing Baby was a proto-meme. Now, almost 25 years after it was first created, an enterprising college student has re-rendered the original model and animation in a suitable HD format for modern displays.

The Dancing Baby is just a 3D rendering of a baby in a diaper, animated to do a little dance to the opening of the song "Hooked on a Feeling" by Swedish rock band Blue Swede (featured on the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack in 2014). It was developed by Michael Girard and Robert Lurye in 1996 as a sample source file for the 3D animation software package Character Studio (used in conjunction with 3D Studio Max). The 3D source film was released to the public that same year so that animators could render their own video clips.

Then a LucasArts staffer named Ron Lussier shared a tweaked version of the file with a few co-workers in an email, launching innumerable email chains that eventually spread outside the company and all over the world. Eventually people began remixing the original dancing baby. There was a Kung Fu Baby, a Rasta Baby, and a Samurai Baby, for instance. The model hit peak virality in 1998, when it was featured in a dream sequence on the popular TV show Ally McBeal, supposedly representing the titular character's anxiety over her ticking biological clock.

Enlarge / "It looks like you're trying to hook up. Would you like help?" (credit: Aurich)

Shane Mac, CEO and co-founder of the conversational AI company Assist, had a problem. After spending most of his time and energy on keeping his young company running and funded, dealing with the semi-rote work of writing to strangers on dating sites was more of a time sink and emotional drain than he liked. So—following the law of the instrument—he created a bot to automate the task.

Mac is only one of many dating app users—so far, apparently all men—that the idea has occurred to. I first came across Mac's idea of semi-autonomous dating in an episode of former CNN technology reporter Laurie Segall's excellent podcast First Contact. After that, a bit more online research led me to a Mashable article that covers an entire world of AI-powered dating site gaming techniques—some of which even have public Github repositories.

Most of the men gaming the apps seem to be following the same script as an MMORPG resource harvesting script—a bot logs on to the site for them, swipes right repeatedly, and perhaps drops a basic introductory message to mutual swipes. The human player simply logs in later and collects the results of the bot's "harvesting" run.

Enlarge / A T-Mobile store in Times Square in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | picture alliance)

T-Mobile's $26 billion acquisition of Sprint is basically a done deal, as a federal judge today ruled that the merger can go forward. T-Mobile said in response that "the companies are now taking final steps to complete their merger," signaling that the deal will likely be finalized soon.

Attorneys general from thirteen states and the District of Columbia sued to block the merger, saying it would reduce competition in the wireless telecommunications market and harm consumers with higher prices. Their arguments were rejected in a ruling issued by District Judge Victor Marrero of US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Marrero's ruling said his decision was difficult because the sides' predictions of how the post-merger future will unfold amount to "competing crystal balls" that "essentially cancel each other out as helpful evidence the Court could comfortably endorse as decidedly affirming one side rather than the other."

Before we can apologize for trying to forcibly Bing you, we need to let you know how excited you really were about it. (credit: Microsoft)

In late January, Microsoft announced that a near-future Office 365 update would roll out a Chrome extension forcing all searches to run through Bing, regardless of the user's configured search engine preference. Several weeks of torches and pitchforks from sysadmins and users alike seem to have convinced the company that this was a tactical error, and today Microsoft announced a change of plans.

The Microsoft Search in Bing browser extension will no longer be deployed by default to Office 365 Pro Plus users. Instead, administrators will get a new toggle in the Admin Center allowing them to deploy the extension to their organization—and, importantly, the toggle defaults to off.

For now, even when an admin decides to toggle the feature on, it only affects managed (Active Directory domain joined) devices—employees' personal and home computers won't get Binged as a result, even if they've used some of the five legitimate installations per license to put Office 365 Pro Plus on those devices. (Microsoft does plan additional settings to allow more granular control of unmanaged devices in the future, so BOFHs will simply need to be patient.)