NASA’s InSight lander detected seismic waves from a meteoroid and was able to capture the sound of the space rock striking the surface of Mars for the first time. The meteoroid – the term used for incoming space rocks before they hit the ground – entered Mars’ atmosphere on Sept. 5, 2021, exploding into at least three shards that each left craters behind. Mars’ atmosphere is just 1% as dense as Earth’s, allowing far more meteoroids to pass through and impact the Red Planet’s surface.
This event marks the first time seismic and acoustic waves from an impact were detected on the Red Planet. Why does this meteoroid impact sound like a “bloop” in the video? It has to do with a peculiar atmospheric effect that’s also observed in deserts on Earth.
After sunset, the atmosphere retains some heat accumulated during the day. Sound waves travel through this heated atmosphere at different speeds, depending on their frequency. As a result, lower-pitched sounds arrive before high-pitched sounds. An observer close to the impact would hear a “bang,” while someone many miles away would hear the bass sounds first, creating a “bloop.”
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter flew over the estimated impact site to confirm the location. The orbiter used its black-and-white Context Camera to reveal three darkened spots on the surface.
After locating these spots, the orbiter’s team used the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, or HiRISE, to get a color close-up of the craters. Because HiRISE sees wavelengths the human eye can’t detect, scientists change the camera’s filters to enhance the color of the image. The areas that appear blue around the craters are where dust has been removed or disturbed by the blast of the impact. Martian dust is bright and red, so removing it makes the surface appear relatively dark and blue.
A new record for Burning Man. Thank you to Drift Studios and the 10 artists that produced this gift for the playa. You can see a grid of charging pads that the drones return to for recharging. This allows the show to go on for hours. The scale is immense, and visible from quite a distance. The physical movement limits of the drones lends itself to fluid motion and mesmerizing organic forms.
Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn founded Studio Drift in 2006 with the aim of pursuing the idea of reacting to and questioning human behavior with their creations. Nauta’s skills and experience in terms of craftsmanship and technology, and Gordijn’s feel for forms and concepts complement each other perfectly. Their designs inventively unite nature and technology, ideology and reality.
The duo has once again created a beautiful drone show for this year’s Burning Man festival. Starting out as sketches on paper, they translate each idea into the custom software needed to operate the drones. “We are using this technology to create artistic expressions and we want to push the boundaries of what is possible.”
Back in January of 2021 GameStop’s stock price exploded as Reddit trolls went to war with old-school investors after the latter bet on the company failing. Reddit et al called their bluff, and well, it’s now the stuff of documentary films. Speaking of, Netflix just released a new trailer for its upcoming documentary about the wild “gamestonks” saga, and it’s made some of the trollish Redditors who were involved in all this very mad. So mad, they’re threatening to cancel their streaming subscriptions.
Let’s rewind real quick to (briefly) explain what the hell happened back in January 2021.
At the beginning of the year, GameStop’s stock was trading at under $20 a share, and the brick-and-mortar retail chain it was attached to was in desperate need of a Plan B. But when institutional investors began short-selling the stock—effectively betting that the company was overvalued and would soon implode—-something odd happened: Its stock price more than tripled in value, reaching just over $73 on January 22, 2021.
Why? A bunch of retail investors on Reddit and TikTok believed that GameStop was more valuable than the shorters were claiming and began buying up its stock. This had the effect of raising the price for the institutional investors betting on its failure, who suddenly had to cover the price difference or eat the costs. Eventually, too many rich people got screwed so stock-trading apps like Robinhood blocked users from buying more GameStop assets and the whole thing became a terrible mess, a perfect example of the hellscape that is modern-day capitalism.
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Boy, the stock bros and Redditors really, really hate it.
Over on r/SuperStonk—the main GameStop stock theory-crafting subreddit (yes, that’s a real thing)—you can find numerous, highly upvoted, and popular posts declaring that the doc is a “bad portrayal” of retail investors, with many imploring all who’ll listen to cancel their Netflix accounts in retaliation.
Stonk bros are mad at the doc for a few different reasons, but the two big things that keep coming up are the supposed lack of input from investors on r/SuperStonk and r/WallStreetBets and because of the final line of the trailer, spoken by journalist Taylor Lorenz. The trailer ends with her seemingly poking fun at the Redditors who set out to fight the GameStop short sellers, saying, “Yolo, let’s destroy the economy.” That line seems to have really angered a particular group of Reddit investors.
“I’m ready to cancel Netflix anyways…yolo lady gave me a reason. Slater Netflix,” said one user on r/SuperStonk. “Cancel Netflix and use that money to buy GME [stock]?” replied another. Of course, very few have shared images or other evidence proving that they have canceled their subscriptions, or that they even had one to begin with. And other users on r/SuperStonk expressed disbelief at the idea of people canceling a sub over a documentary that hadn’t even been released yet.
Still, over on Twitter, you can find tons of angry replies to Netflix’s trailer, with people claiming it’s just a hit job meant to make retail investors look terrible. Even Taylor Lorenz has come out and clarified that she is adamantly opposed to the broken and unfair economic system of Wall Street, calling it “undeniably unhealthy.” But that doesn’t matter to angry investors. I guess all you need is one soundbite from an unreleased movie’s trailer to know it’s a hit piece.
Those cool AI-generated images you’ve seen across the internet? There’s a good chance they are based on the works of Greg Rutkowski.
Rutkowski is a Polish digital artist who uses classical painting styles to create dreamy fantasy landscapes. He has made illustrations for games such as Sony’s Horizon Forbidden West, Ubisoft’s Anno, Dungeons & Dragons, and Magic: The Gathering. And he’s become a sudden hit in the new world of text-to-image AI generation.
His distinctive style is now one of the most commonly used prompts in the new open-source AI art generator Stable Diffusion, which was launched late last month. The tool, along with other popular image-generation AI models, allows anyone to create impressive images based on text prompts.
For example, type in “Wizard with sword and a glowing orb of magic fire fights a fierce dragon Greg Rutkowski,” and the system will produce something that looks not a million miles away from works in Rutkowksi’s style.
But these open-source programs are built by scraping images from the internet, often without permission and proper attribution to artists. As a result, they are raising tricky questions about ethics and copyright. And artists like Rutkowski have had enough.
According to the website Lexica, which tracks over 10 million images and prompts generated by Stable Diffusion, Rutkowski’s name has been used as a prompt around 93,000 times. Some of the world’s most famous artists, such as Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso, and Leonardo da Vinci, brought up around 2,000 prompts each or less. Rutkowski’s name also features as a prompt thousands of times in the Discord of another image-to-text generator, Midjourney.
Rutkowski was initially surprised but thought it might be a good way to reach new audiences. Then he tried searching for his name to see if a piece he had worked on had been published. The online search brought back work that had his name attached to it but wasn’t his.
“It’s been just a month. What about in a year? I probably won’t be able to find my work out there because [the internet] will be flooded with AI art,” Rutkowski says. “That’s concerning.”
Stability.AI, the company that built Stable Diffusion, trained the model on the LAION-5B data set, which was compiled by the German nonprofit LAION. LAION put the data set together and narrowed it down by filtering out watermarked images and those that were not aesthetic, such as images of logos, says Andy Baio, a technologist and writer who downloaded and analyzed some of Stable Diffusion’s data. Baio analyzed 12 million of the 600 million images used to train the model and found that a large chunk of them come from third-party websites such as Pinterest and art shopping sites such as Fine Art America.
Many of Rutkowski’s artworks have been scraped from ArtStation, a website where lots of artists upload their online portfolios. His popularity as an AI prompt stems from a number of reasons.
“Secret Pass – Eagle Nest” is a personal work featured in Rutkowski’s ArtStation portfolio.
GREG RUTKOWSKI
First, his fantastical and ethereal style looks very cool. He is also prolific, and many of his illustrations are available online in high enough quality, so there are plenty of examples to choose from. An early text-to-image generator called Disco Diffusion offered Rutkowski as an example prompt.
Rutkowski has also added alt text in English when uploading his work online. These descriptions of the images are useful for people with visual impairments who use screen reader software, and they help search engines rank the images as well. This also makes them easy to scrape, and the AI model knows which images are relevant to prompts.
Stability.AI released the model into the wild for free and allows anyone to use it for commercial or noncommercial purposes, although Tom Mason, the chief technology officer of Stability.AI, says Stable Diffusion’s license agreement explicitly bans people from using the model or its derivatives in a way that breaks any laws or regulations. This places the onus on the users.
Some artists may have been harmed in the process
Other artists besides Rutkowski have been surprised by the apparent popularity of their work in text-to-image generators—and some are now fighting back. Karla Ortiz, an illustrator based in Los Angeles who found her work in Stable Diffusion’s data set, has been raising awareness about the issues around AI art and copyright.
Artists say they risk losing income as people start using AI-generated images based on copyrighted material for commercial purposes. But it’s also a lot more personal, Ortiz says, arguing that because art is so closely linked to a person, it could raise data protection and privacy problems.
“There is a coalition growing within artist industries to figure out how to tackle or mitigate this,” says Ortiz. The group is in its early days of mobilization, which could involve pushing for new policies or regulation.
One suggestion is that AI models could be trained on images in the public domain, and AI companies could forge partnerships with museums and artists, Ortiz says.
“It’s not just artists … It’s photographers, models, actors and actresses, directors, cinematographers,” she says. “Any sort of visual professional is having to deal with this particular question right now.”
Currently artists don’t have the choice to opt in to the database or have their work removed. Carolyn Henderson, the manager for her artist husband, Steve Henderson, whose work was also in the database, said she had emailed Stability.AI to ask for her husband’s work to be removed, but the request was “neither acknowledged nor answered.”
“Open-source AI is a tremendous innovation, and we appreciate that there are open questions and differing legal opinions. We expect them to be resolved over time, as AI becomes more ubiquitous and different groups come to a consensus as to how to balance individual rights and essential AI/ML research,” says Stability.AI’s Mason. “We strive to find the balance between innovating and helping the community.”
Rutkowski’s “Castle Defense, 2018” (left) and a Stable Diffusion prompted image.
Mason encourages any artists who don’t want their works in the data set to contact LAION, which is an independent entity from the startup. LAION did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Berlin-based artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst are working on tools to help artists opt out of being in training data sets. They launched a site called Have I Been Trained, which lets artists search to see whether their work is among the 5.8 billion images in the data set that was used to train Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. Some online art communities, such as Newgrounds, are already taking a stand and have explicitly banned AI-generated images.
An industry initiative called Content Authenticity Initiative, which includes the likes of Adobe, Nikon, and the New York Times, are developing an open standard that would create a sort of watermark on digital content to prove its authenticity. It could help fight disinformation as well as ensuring that digital creators get proper attribution.
“It could also be a way in which creators or IP holders can assert ownership over media that belongs to them or synthesized media that’s been created with something that belongs to them,” says Nina Schick, an expert on deepfakes and synthetic media.
Pay-per-play
AI-generated art poses tricky legal questions. In the UK, where Stability.AI is based, scraping images from the internet without the artist’s consent to train an AI tool could be a copyright infringement, says Gill Dennis, a lawyer at the firm Pinsent Masons. Copyrighted works can be used to train an AI under “fair use,” but only for noncommercial purposes. While Stable Diffusion is free to use, Stability.AI also sells premium access to the model through a platform called DreamStudio.
The UK, which hopes to boost domestic AI development, wants to change laws to give AI developers greater access to copyrighted data. Under these changes, developers would be able to scrape works protected by copyright to train their AI systems for both commercial and noncommercial purposes.
While artists and other rights holders would not be able to opt out of this regime, they will be able to choose where they make their works available. The art community could end up moving into a pay-per-play or subscription model like the one used in the film and music industries.
“The risk, of course, is that rights holders simply refuse to make their works available, which would undermine the very reason for extending fair use in the AI development space in the first place,” says Dennis.
In the US, LinkedIn lost a case in an appeals court, which ruled last spring that scraping publicly available data from sources on the internet is not a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Google also won a case against authors who objected to the company’s scraping their copyrighted works for Google Books.
Rutkowski says he doesn’t blame people who use his name as a prompt. For them, “it’s a cool experiment,” he says. “But for me and many other artists, it’s starting to look like a threat to our careers.”
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It probably sucks to be Twitter today.Photo: Lionel Bonaventure / AFP
Twitter essentially received a shellacking on Capitol Hill on Tuesday after its ex-security chief Peiter Zatko told a room full of senators that the company is essentially an insecure hot mess infiltrated with more than one foreign government spy.
Hosted by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the hearing covered a range of serious allegations against Twitter made by Zatko, who in July sent a 200-page whistleblower complaint to federal agencies and lawmakers. The former employee, who was fired in January, lambasted the Twitter on numerous fronts, claiming that the social media network had cybersecurity failures that made it vulnerable to exploitation; that executives prioritized profits over security; that Twitter doesn’t know “what data [it] has, where it lives, or where it came from”; and that employees have access to too much user data and too many systems; among others.
Although Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was invited to attend the hearing to offer the company’s point of view, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said that Agrawal had declined to attend because it would “jeopardize” the company’s legal fight against Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk is trying to get out of his $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter. His legal has subpoenaed Zatko, who will comply.
The refusal didn’t go over well with Grassley—a self-proclaimed lover of Twitter—who criticized Agrawal’s decision.
“Many of the allegations directly implicate Mr. Agrawal, and he should be here to address them,” Grassley said. “So let me be very clear: The business of this committee and protecting Americans from foreign influence is more important than Twitter’s civil litigation in Delaware. If these allegations are true, I don’t see how Mr. Agrawal can maintain his position at Twitter.”
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After Zatko’s testimony, a Twitter spokesperson told Gizmodo in an emailed statement that the whistleblower’s allegations didn’t make sense.
“Today’s hearing only confirms that Mr. Zatko’s allegations are riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies,” the Twitter spokesperson said.
Furthermore, Twitter underscored that foreign influence does not play a role in its hiring. In addition, the company explained that it had measures in place to monitor access to its data. These measures include background checks, access controls, and monitoring and detection systems, among others, according to the company.
Alexis Ronickher, an attorney for Zatko, did issue a statement after the hearing, calling it a “watershed moment.”
“Mr. Zatko is hopeful that the Committee’s work today has helped educate the public about just how dire the security and privacy situation is at Twitter and how impacted we all are by these failures,” Ronickher said. “He continues to believe that through this public disclosure process, real world harm for Twitter users may be avoided and our country’s national security better protected.”
While three-hour hearing featured many astounding revelations, here is a breakdown of the moments that most stood out to Gizmodo.
Twitter Doesn’t Know What Data They Have, So They Can’t Delete It
In his opening statement, Zatko cited novelist Upton Sinclair, famous for his 1906 novel The Jungle, who once said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
This can be seen among the executive team at Twitter, Zatko said, explaining that the company doesn’t know what data it has, where it is, or where it came from. Consequently, according to the whistleblower, they can’t protect it.
In addition, when it comes to deleting user data, Zatko commented later on in the hearing that Twitter can’t delete data because it doesn’t know where it is.
The FBI Told Twitter That It Had At Least One Chinese Agent in the Company
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley said that the FBI had informed Twitter that there was at least one Chinese foreign agent in the company. In addition, the senator revealed that it was suspected that India had managed to place at least two foreign agents in Twitter.
While CNN and the Washington Post, which had access to Zatko’s whistleblower disclosure, had previously reported that foreign agents were inside Twitter, it was not clear what countries they were from.
Zatko was also asked why Twitter did not have a system in place to limit the access spies from countries like India, Nigeria, and China possibly have at Twitter, which they could use to identify and punish dissidents. His answer was mind-boggling.
“I think they would like to, but they’re simply unwilling to put the effort in at the cost of other efforts, such as driving revenue,” the whistleblower explained. “I’m reminded of one conversation with an executive when I said, ‘I am confident that we have a foreign agent,’ and their response was, ‘Well, since we already have one, what does it matter if we have more? Let’s keep growing the office.’”
Twitter Has Way More Data on Users Than They Might Think
At this point in our digital lifetimes, it’s clear that online companies have way more information on us than we’d like to think they do. According to Zatko, Twitter has the following information on the average Twitter user:
Phone number
Latest IP address they’ve connected from
Other IP addresses users have connected from
Current email address and how long users have been using the email with the account
Prior emails for the account associated with the IP address
An inference of where users live
Whether they’re connected to Twitter right now
Whether users are still connected even if they’re not actively using the information on Twitter
Type of device users are connected with
Type of browser
Brand of the device and possibly specific device model
What language individuals are using connect to Twitter
It Seems Like One of Twitter’s Most Infamous Users Was Watching
As we all know, tech’s wackiest CEO has been searching high and low for a way to get out of buying Twitter and is currently battling it out in the courts. Although Musk did not explicitly say he was watching Zatko’s testimony to Congress, he did tweet out a popcorn emoji around the same time the hearing started.
In addition, Musk tweeted out a story from the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow, published the same day of the hearing, detailing how many of the whistleblower’s former colleagues had been approached and offered money for information on him by numerous companies on behalf of their clients.
“Anyone know who the secret clients are? Let’s out them on Twitter rn haha,” Musk tweeted. In a subsequent tweet, he underlined that Zatko’s colleagues wanted to defend his credibility.
Lindsey Graham Seems to Have Given Musk an Assist
Focusing on the platform itself, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina asked Zatko whether he would recommend that people continue to use Twitter or “take a time out.” The Twitter whistleblower explained that he felt the social media platform was a “hugely valuable service” that he didn’t want to see shut down. He wanted it to get better.
Here’s where things got a little weird. Out of nowhere, Graham suddenly asks Zatko whether he would buy Twitter, given what he knows about the company. Considering we’ve been talking about topics like privacy, security, data access, and foreign agents, that question seemed a bit off. Could Graham be trying to buddy up to Musk?
Zatko seemed taken aback and appeared to laugh nervously.
“I guess that depends on the price,” the ex-employee said.
Thousands of Twitter Employees Had Access to Advertisers’ Banking Information
It seems that all platforms tell us that access to our banking information is sacred and super protected. According to Zatko, not so at Twitter. The whistleblower explained that when he first joined Twitter, “thousands of users [workers] had access to the advertiser’s information, including their bank accounts and routing numbers.”
“When I first joined, people could change that information,” Zatko pointed out. “And you can understand why changing the banking account information of a company such as Apple or Nike might be problematic.”
The company launched its Beacon software a year ago.Photo: Slingshot Aerospace
Space is getting a little too crowded, increasing the risk of orbital collisions. Slingshot Aerospace, a company specializing in space data analytics, is now offering a solution to regulate some of the traffic up there. The company announced on Tuesday that it is rolling out a free version of its space traffic control system to help satellite operators dodge collisions.
“Space connects every single one of us every day,” Melanie Stricklan, co-founder and CEO of Slingshot Aerospace, told Gizmodo. “Our lives have become dependent upon space, and that dependency means that there’s actually a growing vulnerability,” requiring us to better “manage these critical assets that are over our heads.”
The company’s Slingshot Beacon software works like an air traffic control system, but for spacecraft in orbit. It pulls in public and private data provided by Slingshot’s customers to create a space catalog. The system then sends out urgent collision alerts to satellite operators worldwide, coordinates satellite maneuvers should there be a risk of collision, and allows operators to communicate with each other, especially during high-risk moments.
Slingshot Aerospace launched Beacon a year ago and is now offering a free basic version to satellite operators in hopes of increasing the number of users on its platform. “We’ve been testing it for the past year with a select few so as not to get overwhelmed by the data,” Stricklan said. “And we have 100% confidence that we are ready to scale to a global scale.” By offering the free version, the company anticipates that some satellite operators will seek the software’s advanced options, which offer more accurate and refined data.
There are more than 9,800 satellites in orbit today, with more than 115,000 planned to launch by 2030, according to Slingshot’s space object database. And that’s in addition to the thousands of pieces of space junk currently in orbit around our planet. Some satellite operators are currently working with outdated technology that wasn’t designed for the volume of spacecraft in orbit today, making then unreliable when it comes to issuing warnings of potential in-space collisions. “There’s a lot of noise out there,” Stricklan said. “They’re getting thousands of [collision warnings] a day, so it just turns into noise.”
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The U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron provides satellite operators with collision warnings, but it often generates thousands of warnings that include those with very little chances of collision. But Slingshot Beacon promises a more accurate model that eliminates the extra noise and helps satellite operators navigate a more crowded orbit.
“Right now, there’s not really a way to grab on to the debris and deorbit it,” Stricklan said. “We can’t continue to study the problem, we have to have capabilities like Slingshot out there that can present a solution…time is of the essence.”
Amazon has agreed to buy Cloostermans, a company that makes robots capable of stacking pallets in its warehouses. Amazon says it already uses Belgium-based Cloostermans’ tech, which can also package products.
After the acquisition closes, Cloostermans’ 200 or so employees will join the Amazon Global Robotics division in Europe and likely dedicate their time to solely building tech that suits Amazon’s needs. "By focusing Cloostermans’s deep experience in engineering, machinery, and robotics, we will more rapidly deploy solutions in our workplace that support employees in their roles and improve safety at work, and also help reduce packaging waste," Amazon said in a press release. The company has previously spoken of its belief that having more robots will improve worker safety.
Amazon has been introducing more robots to its warehouses to increase automation. In June, it revealed Proteus, its first autonomous warehouse robot. The device is capable of moving carts filled with packages by itself.
While Amazon has been relying more on robots at its fulfillment centers for several years, the Cloostermans acquisition comes soon after employees at a Staten Island facility became the first Amazon warehouse workers to win a union election. The company said in 2019 that automation isn’t expected to replace human workers at warehouses for at least a decade.
