Month: July 2022

Enlarge / Ukraine's Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova (C-L) and Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Britain's Karim Khan (C-R), visit a mass grave on the grounds of the Church of Saint Andrew in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, on April 13, 2022. (credit: Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images)

TikTok is resisting calls to preserve and hand over access to its content for war crime investigations, as lawyers and activists warn that the Chinese-owned app is a major data challenge in prosecuting atrocities in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The video app’s popularity with young Ukrainians and Russians posting footage of the war has made it a trove of digital intelligence that investigators are attempting to mine and archive as evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and illegal acts of violence in Ukraine.

TikTok, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, has been criticized for being slow to respond to requests for product changes that allow the video app’s content to be archived and verified more easily, as well as better access to TikTok’s platform for members of civil society.

Enlarge / A PC running Windows 11. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is planning yet another big change to the way it updates Windows, according to a report from Windows Central. Rather than updating a single version of Windows for many years as it did with Windows 10, Microsoft plans to return to a schedule where it releases a new major version of Windows roughly once every three years, putting a hypothetical "Windows 12" on track for release at some point in the fall of 2024.

On the surface, this looks a lot like a return to the pre-Windows 10 status quo. 2006's Windows Vista was succeeded by 2009's Windows 7, 2012's Windows 8, and 2015's Windows 10. But the report says that Microsoft will continue to refine the current Windows release at a steady clip, with new feature drops (internally called "Moments") planned roughly once per quarter. We've already gotten a taste of that with Windows 11, which has evolved steadily throughout the year instead of saving all its big changes for the pending Windows 11 22H2 update.

When Windows 11 was released in October of 2021, Microsoft said that both Windows 11 and Windows 10 would receive major "feature update releases" once per year in the second half of the year. This was already a change from Windows 10, which received two of these updates per year. But Windows Central reports that Windows 11's 2023 feature update has already been "scrapped," suggesting that the big yearly update model could be going away for good.

Enlarge / Anna Kikina will be the fifth Russian woman to go to space. (credit: Roscosmos)

NASA and its Russian counterpart, Roscosmos, have officially agreed to exchange seats on four upcoming missions to the International Space Station. The first missions—with a Russian on SpaceX's Crew Dragon and an American on Soyuz vehicles—will fly in September.

"Flying integrated crews ensures there are appropriately trained crew members on board the station for essential maintenance and spacewalks," said NASA spokesman Josh Finch in a statement. "It also protects against contingencies such as a problem with any crew spacecraft, serious crew medical issues, or an emergency aboard the station that requires a crew and the vehicle they are assigned to return to Earth sooner than planned."

As expected, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio will fly alongside cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin on the Soyuz MS-22 mission, which is scheduled to launch on September 21 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Additionally, NASA's Loral O’Hara will fly along with cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub on the Soyuz MS-23 mission next spring.