Month: September 2023

Enlarge / A view of India's Vikram lander taken Wednesday from the Pragyan rover. (credit: ISRO)

It's been more than a week since India's Chandrayaan 3 mission landed on the Moon, and it's a good time to assess where the world's most populous nation stands relative to other global other space powers.

The successful arrival of the Chandrayaan 3 mission's Vikram lander on the Moon made India the first country besides China to achieve a soft landing on the lunar surface since 1976, following a series of failed landings by private organizations and India itself four years ago. And it made India just the fourth nation overall to achieve this feat.

Since the landing of Chandrayaan 3 on August 23, India has released some early findings from the lander and its mobile rover, named Pragyan, along with photos of the vehicles exploring the Moon's alien charcoal-color landscape.

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

The right-to-repair movement has had its share of adversaries. From Big Tech to politicians and individuals who don't think product repairability should be government-mandated, it's been a tedious battle for a movement that has seen major wins lately. One of the most recent wins came from Apple, a former DIY repair combatant, supporting repairability legislation. But taking Apple's place is a new entity looking to limit right-to-repair legislation: Scientologists.

Today, 404 Media reported on a letter sent on August 10 to the US Copyright Office by Ryland Hawkins of Author Services Inc. The company, its website and letterhead say, represents the "literary, theatrical, and musical works of L. Ron Hubbard, the late founder of Scientology. Author Services, according to records archived via the WayBackMachine, is owned by the Chuch of Spiritual Technology, which describes itself as a church within Scientology.

The letter addresses Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which "makes it unlawful to circumvent technological measures used to prevent unauthorized access to copyrighted works." The Scientology group's letter seeks to alter exemptions granted for self-repairing some consumer electronics, like video game consoles, laptops, home appliances, and farming tractors.