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Enlarge / The iPad Air 2 (left) next to the iPad Air (right). (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you take your fourth-generation iPad into Apple for a repair, the company may replace your tablet with a newer iPad Air 2 instead. According to an internal memo published by MacRumors, Apple started doing this on March 30, right around when the $329 iPad became available for purchase:

Starting March 30, iPad 4th generation whole unit repairs may be substituted to iPad Air 2 models. Apple's repair and order management tool will indicate for each repair if a substitution will take place. Please note the substitute part’s color and capacity to ensure the customer understands what their replacement iPad whole unit will be.

While you may get a new color and capacity, we also assume that customers with Smart Covers or other accessories for their fourth-generation iPads will need to buy new accessories for the iPad Air 2; we've contacted Apple for clarification and will update if we get a response.

The iPad Air 2 is two years newer than an iPad 4—it's significantly thinner, lighter, and faster, and it support iOS features like multitasking than the iPad 4 isn't capable of. More importantly, it's certain to be supported by the next major version of iOS, while the iPad 4 is more than likely to be dropped from the support list. Apple is likely running out of parts and replacement tablets for the older iPad, while the only-recently-discontinued iPad Air 2 is still available in abundance in Apple's refurbished store.

Enlarge / The iPad Air 2 (left) next to the iPad Air (right). (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you take your fourth-generation iPad into Apple for a repair, the company may replace your tablet with a newer iPad Air 2 instead. According to an internal memo published by MacRumors, Apple started doing this on March 30, right around when the $329 iPad became available for purchase:

Starting March 30, iPad 4th generation whole unit repairs may be substituted to iPad Air 2 models. Apple's repair and order management tool will indicate for each repair if a substitution will take place. Please note the substitute part’s color and capacity to ensure the customer understands what their replacement iPad whole unit will be.

While you may get a new color and capacity, we also assume that customers with Smart Covers or other accessories for their fourth-generation iPads will need to buy new accessories for the iPad Air 2; we've contacted Apple for clarification and will update if we get a response.

The iPad Air 2 is two years newer than an iPad 4—it's significantly thinner, lighter, and faster, and it support iOS features like multitasking than the iPad 4 isn't capable of. More importantly, it's certain to be supported by the next major version of iOS, while the iPad 4 is more than likely to be dropped from the support list. Apple is likely running out of parts and replacement tablets for the older iPad, while the only-recently-discontinued iPad Air 2 is still available in abundance in Apple's refurbished store.

NASA

When the Internet came along in the 1990s, like a lot of government agencies, NASA kind of scratched its head and wondered what to make of all this freely shared information. But unlike a lot of other agencies, NASA had a trove of images, audio, and video the general public wanted to see. After all, this was the agency that had sent people to the Moon, taken photos of every planet in the Solar System, and launched the Hubble Space Telescope.

So each of the NASA field centers—there are 10 of them—began digitizing their photo archives and putting them online. Johnson Space Center in Houston, for example, had thousands of images of space shuttle astronauts training and flying in space. Kennedy Space Center had launch photos. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory had planets, rings, comets, and more. Unfortunately, these images were spread across dozens of NASA.gov sites, with no good way to search the different databases.

Video shot and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Pity the life of the average police car. Driven in shifts, it might easily hit 20,000 miles (32,000km) in a year. And if that's not enough, a car driven two shifts a day might spend up to ten hours a day idling. That's tough on the car, but it's even tougher on the planet thanks to all those pollutants, and it's even tough on the taxpayer's wallet. After all, gas isn't free.

Jannis Hermanns

But why?

While my son and I were playing with LEGO, after building a 1987 GMC Vandura and an off-road Segway I suddenly had the urge to build one of the first computers I remember using:

Enlarge / Is it "fresh malware"? Or is it something else repackaged? (credit: from an image by Sarah Shuda)

Last November, a systems engineer at a large company was evaluating security software products when he discovered something suspicious.

One of the vendors had provided a set of malware samples to test—48 files in an archive stored in the vendor's Box cloud storage account. The vendor providing those samples was Cylance, the information security company behind Protect, a "next generation" endpoint protection system built on machine learning. In testing, Protect identified all 48 of the samples as malicious, while competing products flagged most but not all of them. Curious, the engineer took a closer look at the files in question—and found that seven weren't malware at all.

That led the engineer to believe Cylance was using the test to close the sale by providing files that other products wouldn't detect—that is, bogus malware only Protect would catch.