Day: May 5, 2021

After years of development and more than a handful of delays along the way, Blue Origin plans to attempt the first official flight of its New Shepard spacecraft on July 20th. The company will offer one seat to the highest bidder of an online auction that starts today. Until May 19th, anyone can visit Blue Origin’s website and place a private bid. After that date, the company will unseal the bids, allowing all involved to see how much money is at play. The entire process will then culminate on June 12th with a live auction to determine the winner of the seat. The company will donate the money it raises to its STEM-focused foundation, Club for the Future.

Provided everything goes according to plan on July 20th, the company’s autonomous New Shepard rocket will fly six passengers 62 miles (or just shy of 100km) above the surface of the Earth into suborbital space. Those on the flight won’t get to circle the planet, but they will experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth before they return to the ground. Notably, Jeff Bezos and company haven’t said how much they plan to charge for New Shepard tickets once flights become a regular occurrence. 

Blue Origin won’t be the only rocket company flying civilian astronauts to space this year. As part of a charity flight for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon craft will take four regular people to orbit later this year.

Researchers from a nonprofit organization called the Me2ba Alliance recently looked at a large number of apps used by schools all around the country. The researchers were concerned that these apps, based on readily available software development kits, might be leaking data on children to third parties and advertisers. The study looked at 73 apps in use by 38 schools in 14 states across the nation.

The researchers found that 60 percent of the apps were sending student data to various third parties, and roughly half the apps are sending data to Google. In fact, the study found that every Android app in use was sending data to Google. Another 14 percent of the apps in the study were sending data to Facebook.

Researchers found that, on average, there were 10.6 third-party data channels present in each of the apps they investigated. Researchers examine the apps by looking at their software development kits, which are prepackaged code modules provided to developers. SDKs run in the background and rarely asked for consent before sending data to a third-party developer.

The study identified 56 unique SDKs used by most apps, with the majority of them owned by major tech companies. The tech companies include Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Square, and Twitter. Researchers further arranged the apps into medium-risk SDKs and very high-risk SDKs. The medium risk were design for utility purposes with a very high-risk design for advertising and monetization. In all, 18 percent of the apps in the study were placed into the very high-risk category.