The co-founder of MoviePass wants to make going to the movies more affordable, so long as you’re comfortable submitting to mandatory ad watching and creepy surveillance tech. PreShow, an invitation-only service launched by Stacy Spikes, uses facial recognition software to make sure you are actively tuning into a hellacious amount of ads. In return for this indentured consumerism, you get a free movie ticket.
According to the PreShow Kickstarter, which launched on Thursday, the company uses its “proprietary facial identification software” to ensure you actually watch the 15 to 20 minutes of branded content on your device. “The motion detector automatically pauses playback if you have to step away,” according to the project page. “You can resume watching anytime at your leisure.”
It’s not until you’ve watched the entire ad that you’ll be credited your free movie ticket. The Kickstarter page states that privacy is a “top concern” for the company, and that while no users are recorded and no “personally identifiable data is shared,” they can share aggregated and anonymized data to their partners. So your uniquely personal habits may, as they claim, remain private, but the accumulated data still offers brands insight into the behavior of certain groups of people. That’s valuable and exploitable information for a company that profits exactly from that.
“Well, why can’t you have an ad-supported version that will allow you to go to movies for free?” Spikes told TechCrunch.
It’s possible that PreShow is mostly a B2B play to license their watch-the-fucking-ad technology to third parties. In the world of movie business model “disruption,” such licensing is common. Both MoviePass and competitor Sinemia have attempted to do this with their ticket-subscription tech.
Of course, as we’ve increasingly come to understand, “free” is a loaded word when it comes to reaping the benefits in the digital age—a free service oftentimes means sacrificing your time and your privacy. In PreShow’s case, it dangles the promise of a “free” movie-going experience for what’s a stone’s throw from clamping your eyes open to make sure you consume the necessary content.
Cable companies have been nervous about streaming services for a while, but now they have a particularly good reason to be jittery. An MPAA report citing IHS Markit data has shown that there were more subscriptions worldwide to online video services (613.3 million) than there were for cable (556 million) in 2018, reflecting a 27 percent jump in streaming over 2017. Cable subscriptions dropped two percent in that period. IP-based TV overtook satellite, too, indicating a larger overall shift to the digital realm.
The data also indicated that people were spending more on digital video at home than trips to the theater. While theatrical spending did grow ever so slightly in 2018 to $41.1 billion, people around the world spent a total of $42.6 billion on streaming, downloads and video-on-demand. Discs, meanwhile, declined to $13.1 billion — just over half of what it was back in 2014.
This isn’t a decisive victory for online video, at least not yet. Cable and satellite are still larger than streaming when combined. More importantly, cable and satellite are still the most lucrative in terms of sheer revenue, if not necessarily profit. Cable’s influx of cash grew $6.2 billion in 2018 to reach $118 billion, suggesting that those people who did stick with cable were paying more than ever. The MPAA added that most of those who were subscribing to internet services also had conventional TV, suggesting that the number of cord cutters isn’t as large as you might think.
These are nonetheless major milestones for internet video. It’s now the most popular individual TV format in terms of sheer subscriptions, and companies wanting the widest possible reach might have to pay attention. Likewise, movie studios and award groups might have to take streaming releases more seriously even if they’ve been less than thrilled in the past. While conventional TV and theaters are far from gone, they might have reached an inflection point.
The schedule for Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has slipped again, and the company will no longer launch an uncrewed test flight to the International Space Station in April, Reuters has reported. The flight is being pushed back to August. Starliner is Boeing’s entry for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program to ferry both cargo and people to the ISS and back. The company’s spaceship is a competitor with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which successfully docked with the ISS earlier this month – albeit without c
LONDON — Amnesty International attacked the auto industry on Thursday for marketing electric vehicles (EVs) as environmentally friendly while producing many of the batteries using polluting fossil fuels and unethically sourced minerals.
Manufacturing batteries can be carbon intensive, while the extraction of minerals used in them has been linked to human rights violations such as child labor, a statement from the rights group said.
“Electric vehicles are key to shifting the motor industry away from fossil fuels, but they are currently not as ethical as some retailers would like us to believe,” it said, announcing the initiative at the Nordic Electric Vehicle Summit in Oslo.
Production of lithium-ion batteries for EVs is power intensive, and factories are concentrated in China, South Korea and Japan, where power generation is largely dependent on coal or other fossil fuels, Amnesty said.
Global automakers are investing billions of dollars to ramp up electric vehicle production. German giant Volkswagen for one plans to raise annual production of electric cars to 3 million by 2025, from 40,000 in 2018.
Amnesty demanded the EV industry come up with an ethical and clean battery within five years and in the meantime that carbon footprints be disclosed and supply chains of key minerals identified.
Last month, a letter seen by Reuters showed that 14 non-governmental organizations including Amnesty and Global Witness had opposed plans by the London Metal Exchange to ban cobalt tainted by human rights abuses.
Instead of banning the cobalt brands, the LME should work with firms that produce them to ensure responsible souring, they said.
Microsoft announced DirectX raytracing a year ago, promising to bring hardware-accelerated raytraced graphics to PC gaming. In August, Nvidia announced its RTX 2080 and 2080Ti, a pair of new video cards with the company’s new Turing RTX processors. In addition to the regular graphics-processing hardware, these new chips included two extra sets of additional cores, one set designed for running machine-learning algorithms and the other for computing raytraced graphics. These cards were the first, and currently only, cards to support DirectX Raytracing (DXR).
That’s going to change in April, as Nvidia has announced that 10-series and 16-series cards will be getting some amount of raytracing support with next month’s driver update. Specifically, we’re talking about 10-series cards built with Pascal chips (that’s the 1060 6GB or higher), Titan-branded cards with Pascal or Volta chips (the Titan X, XP, and V), and 16-series cards with Turing chips (Turing, in contrast to the Turing RTX, lacks the extra cores for raytracing and machine learning).
The GTX 1060 6GB and above should start supporting DXR with next month’s Nvidia driver update.
Nvidia
Unsurprisingly, the performance of these cards will not match that of the RTX chips. RTX chips use both their raytracing cores and their machine-learning cores for DXR graphics. To achieve a suitable level of performance, the raytracing simulates relatively few light rays and uses machine-learning-based antialiasing to flesh out the raytraced images. Absent the dedicated hardware, DXR on the GTX chips will use 32-bit integer operations on the CUDA cores already used for computation and shader workloads.
Nvidia says that Turing and Pascal cards will take two to three times longer, respectively, to render each frame than a Turing RTX card. This difference is particularly acute on Pascal cards. In Turing, the 32-bit integer workload used for raytracing can run concurrently with the 32-bit floating-point workload used for other graphical tasks. That’s not the case on Pascal, where the workloads will have to be run consecutively.
This weaker performance means that Nvidia recommends that developers use only simpler raytracing effects on the older chips. On the RTX parts, the raytracing performance can be good enough to enable global illumination—a form of raytracing that enables indirect lighting from reflections, in addition to the usual direct lighting from light sources—but on the GTX parts, Nvidia recommends the use of simpler tasks such as material-specific reflections.
With the RT cores for raytracing and the tensor cores for machine-learning algorithms, the Turing RTX (bottom graph) can process a frame with raytracing relatively quickly. The Turing (middle graph) doesn’t have the dedicated cores, but it can still run the integer workload simultaneously with its floating-point workload for a total frame time of about double the RTX. The Pascal (top graph) has to run the integer and floating-point tasks back to back, so it takes much longer than the Turing, let alone the Turing RTX.
Nvidia
That raytracing can be performed on these older chips isn’t a big surprise. During DXR’s development, Microsoft used a compute-shader-based raytracing algorithm, so clearly the dedicated hardware isn’t necessary. However, the substantial performance difference shows that the dedicated hardware is going to be important, at least for now.
Existing games that use DXR should automatically start using raytracing on the 10-series and 16-series cards once the drivers are updated, without requiring any game updates. However, given the performance differential, we would imagine that developers will want to tailor their raytracing to the older hardware. The burden imposed by raytracing on the RTX chips is substantial, and it’s simply not going to be practical to try to use the same level of raytracing quality on the older cards.
The near-Earth asteroid Bennu could be Exhibit A for space miners making their case to skeptical investors.
New observations by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft suggest that the 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) Bennu harbors lots of accessible water, a key resource that prospective asteroid miners aim to target.
Water can be split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, the chief components of rocket fuel. This stuff can then be sold at off-Earth “gas stations,” where spacecraft could fill their tanks up on the go, mining advocates have stressed.
“For an asteroid miner, Bennu is pay dirt,” OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta told Space.com. “That is exactly the kind of target that we want to go to and process [for] a propellant depot that people have been envisioning for the first profitable asteroid mine.”
Studying Bennu up close
The $800 million OSIRIS-REx mission launched in September 2016 and slipped into orbit around Bennu on Dec. 31 of last year. This latter event was an epic achievement: Bennu is the smallest object ever to be circled by a spacecraft.
OSIRIS-REx is making valuable observations from Bennu orbit, but much of the mission’s science data will be gathered here on Earth. If all goes according to plan, the probe will snag a sample of Bennu material in July 2020, then deliver that stuff to Earth in a special return capsule arriving in September 2023.
The main goal of the mission is to learn more about the solar system’s early days and to better understand the role that dark, carbon-rich asteroids such as Bennu may have played in life’s emergence on Earth. That role is suspected to be significant; scientists think asteroids may have delivered much of our planet’s water, as well as lots of complex organic molecules — the building blocks of life as we know it.
But OSIRIS-REx has several subsidiary objectives, as indicated by its full name: ”Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer.” The “security” bit refers to information that could help humanity better deal with potentially hazardous space rocks, a broad class that counts Bennu as a member. And “resource identification” is a nod to the nascent asteroid-mining industry, which needs to know which rocks to go after.
In December, the OSIRIS-REx team announced the detection of hydrated clay minerals on Bennu’s surface. The find indicated that water was likely abundant in the interior of Bennu’s parent asteroid long ago, the scientists said at the time. (Team members think Bennu is a rubble pile consisting of pieces of that shattered asteroid, which may have been about 62 miles, or 100 kilometers, wide. Bennu may harbor chunks of the impactor as well.)
The new results, which Lauretta and his colleagues announced today (March 19), confirm and extend that recent discovery: OSIRIS-REx has now spotted the apparent signature of the iron-oxide mineral magnetite on Bennu’s surface.
Magnetite is “typically indicative of very intense hydrothermal activity,” Lauretta said.
A candidate sample site on asteroid Bennu for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.
He and the mission team haven’t yet nailed down the origin of this activity. But the leading theory holds that Bennu’s parent asteroid formed far away from the newborn sun, incorporating significant amounts of water ice and organics, along with rocky and metallic material. Some radioactive elements, such as aluminum-26, got sucked up as well, and the heat thrown off by this stuff likely melted lots of that native ice.
“Water probably did circulate through the interior of the asteroid, like a hydrothermal system on Earth, and altered the originally anhydrous rocky material, forming these clays,” Lauretta said. The flow also “probably altered the metals to produce iron oxides, like the magnetite.”
This likely happened very early on, he added — within the first 10 million years or so of the solar system’s existence.
To be clear: The water we’re talking about on present-day Bennu isn’t stand-alone and pure; it’s locked up in those clays, in the form of hydroxyl groups (one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom bonded together). But it is likely accessible: Hydroxyl can be baked out of clays, generating water vapor, asteroid-mining advocates say.
Picture of Bennu taking shape
The magnetite find is just one of many discoveries Lauretta and his colleagues announced today in seven papers, which were published in the journals Nature, Nature Astronomy, Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications. The team also discussed the results during a news conference today at the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in The Woodlands, Texas.
For example, OSIRIS-REx’s observations suggest that Bennu’s rotation rate is speeding up, likely because of the reradiation of solar energy as heat — something known as the Yarkovsky-O’Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (YORP) effect. It currently takes Bennu about 4.3 hours to complete one rotation; if this spin speedup continues apace, that rotational period will be cut in half in 1.5 million years, Lauretta said.
The team also determined Bennu’s bulk density to be about 72.3 lbs. per cubic foot (1,190 kilograms per cubic meter) and the asteroid’s interior to be about 50 percent open space. Both of these numbers indicate that Bennu is a rubble pile rather than a solid block of rock, the scientists said.
And then there’s the asteroid’s surface. By counting craters, the team has estimated that Bennu formed between 100 million and 1 billion years ago, likely after a mammoth collision in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. (Bennu’s move to a near-Earth orbit occurred quite recently; such paths tend to be stable for just 10 million years or so, mission team members said, because of gravitational encounters with Earth and other rocky planets.)
The abundance of visible craters may force a rethink about how asteroids such as Bennu and Ryugu, which Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft is currently studying up close, got their striking diamond shapes. The leading explanation posits that this shape results from a fast spin, which causes loose asteroid material to migrate to equatorial regions. But such migration would be expected to bury many craters, so perhaps something else is going on.
“We’re actively re-evaluating that model,” Lauretta said.
The team also found that, on average, Bennu reflects just 4.4 percent of the sunlight hitting it, making the asteroid one of the darkest objects in the solar system. But Bennu is far from uniform; along with very dark patches, it sports much brighter regions, some of which have reflectivities of 15 percent to 20 percent.
Sample-gathering may be tougher than thought
Bennu’s surface diversity also manifests as rocky ruggedness, which has surprised the mission team. Radar imagery by big, ground-based dishes such as the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico had revealed just one boulder with a width of between 33 feet and 66 feet (10 to 20 meters). Those data, and the suspected spin-induced equatorial migration of material, gave the OSIRIS-REx researchers reason to think Bennu is pretty smooth, at least at low latitudes.
“Everything was self-consistent and suggested a lot of centimeter-scale particles, probably concentrated in the equator,” Lauretta said. “And I was really envisioning kind of a beach that went all the way around the asteroid in equatorial regions.”
But reality is very different from this prediction. OSIRIS-REx has spotted more than 200 boulders in the 33-to-66-foot size range so far, and the biggest boulder-free patches the probe has found to date measure between 16.5 feet and 66 feet (5 to 20 m) wide, one of the new papers reported.
That’s an issue, because the mission design calls for OSIRIS-REx to grab a sample from a boulder-free patch at least 165 feet (50 m) in diameter.
“We have to upgrade the autonomous guidance system on the spacecraft, so it can be a lot smarter and guide us into that smaller region,” Lauretta said.
The team will also have to collect a lot more high-resolution imagery of the landing site than previously anticipated, he added.
Lauretta said he’s confident the team will make everything work, though sample collection may have to be pushed back a bit as a result. But the team has some leeway; the sampling operation can be performed as late as October 2020 with no significant effect on the mission timeline, Lauretta added.
The OSIRIS-REx team takes heart from the success of Hayabusa2, which grabbed samples from rugged Ryugu last month. And Lauretta and some colleagues will travel to Japan in April to get information and advice from Hayabusa2 team members, especially about how Ryugu’s surface behaved during the sampling sortie, he said.
“That’s still our biggest uncertainty — what is the nature of this material in the microgravity environment?” Lauretta said. “What forces are holding it together, and how does it respond when a spacecraft punches it in and then fires thrusters to back away from it?”
The Hayabusa2 team, by the way, unveiled a raft of new results today, as well, in three papers in the journal Science and at LPSC. The Japanese mission has determined that the 3,000-foot-wide (900 m) Ryugu is likely relatively dry, though it’s carbon-rich and diamond-shaped like Bennu.
Ryugu may be drier because it has resided in the inner solar system longer than Bennu or has swung closer to the sun on its various orbits, Lauretta said.
The new OSIRIS-REx results come from observations made during the probe’s approach to Bennu last summer and fall, and its early days orbiting the space rock. There’s a lot more to come, as the science team analyzes more-detailed data and imagery.
For example, OSIRIS-REx hasn’t confirmed the presence of organics on Bennu’s surface, but the probe hasn’t really had a chance to look yet. The observations that may do the trick will be performed seven or eight weeks from now, if all goes according to plan, Lauretta said.
“The science is really starting to ramp up,” he said. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”
And we may have to wait a few years for the most exciting results. Hayabusa2’s sample is scheduled to land on Earth in December 2020, and OSIRIS-REx’s won’t touch down until nearly three years later.
“That’s really exciting,” Lauretta said. “You can learn a lot by bringing a sample back from an asteroid, but we’re going to learn exponentially more by bringing samples back from these two asteroids, which initially looked very similar to each other, may still be related to each other but have had different histories.”
Mike Wall’s book about the search for alien life, “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated byKarl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom orFacebook.
