Month: July 2020

Enlarge (credit: Schönherr et al.)

As Alexa, Google Home, Siri, and other voice assistants have become fixtures in millions of homes, privacy advocates have grown concerned that their near-constant listening to nearby conversations could pose more risk than benefit to users. New research suggests the privacy threat may be greater than previously thought.

The findings demonstrate how common it is for dialog in TV shows and other sources to produce false triggers that cause the devices to turn on, sometimes sending nearby sounds to Amazon, Apple, Google, or other manufacturers. In all, researchers uncovered more than 1,000 word sequences—including those from Game of Thrones, Modern Family, House of Cards, and news broadcasts—that incorrectly trigger the devices.

“The devices are intentionally programmed in a somewhat forgiving manner, because they are supposed to be able to understand their humans,” one of the researchers, Dorothea Kolossa, said. “Therefore, they are more likely to start up once too often rather than not at all.”

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  Falcon 9 leaps off SLC-40 Tuesday with the 3rd GPS-III satellite for the United States Space Force / Air Force. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]

On Tuesday SpaceX launched its 11th Falcon 9 rocket of the year—with a brand-new first stage delivering a 3.7-ton GPS III satellite into orbit for improved navigation services. The mission's customer, the US Space Force, was happy.

“The successful GPS III SV03 launch and recovery serves as another step in our journey with industry partners to create innovative, flexible, and affordable services to meet NSSL mission objectives and propel US dominance in space,” said Col. Robert Bongiovi, Launch Enterprise director.

Tuesday afternoon's launch puts the company on pace for 22 missions in this calendar year, which would break the company's previous record of 21 launches set in 2018. What seems more remarkable about this pace is that it has occurred amidst a global pandemic that has slowed operations in many other countries.

Enlarge / We're not allowed to talk at length about those Valve-specific segments just yet. (credit: Kojima Productions / 505 Games)

For some video game publishers, eight months between a title's console launch and its PC port would be galling. In the case of Death Stranding, on the other hand, that timeframe is astonishingly fast.

The peculiar, critically acclaimed game, and first from industry vanguard Hideo Kojima after his departure from Konami, emerged in 2016 as an apparent PlayStation 4 exclusive. That was the operating assumption for some time, considering Sony rarely ports its console exclusives to PC, but we'd seen hints to the contrary, and the publisher was bold enough to announce the PC version a mere week before the game's PS4 launch. The whole thing felt like a dare to PC gamers: will your Kojima fandom make you cave and buy a PS4 early, or can you wait until Summer 2020 to strap a naked baby to your post-apocalyptic chest?

In my case, an eight-month wait for the PC version was easy to stomach. I had plenty of other games to catch up on, and the prospect of a higher-performance romp through Kojima's United Cities of America tided me over.