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When the Chinese government announced a ban on initial coin offerings last week, it looked like an attempt to rein in the speculative excesses of the cryptocurrency economy. But now it seems like it might have been the start of something more ambitious: a coordinated campaign to shut down use of cryptocurrency in the Middle Kingdom.

The full extent of the Chinese crackdown isn’t clear yet, in part because key decisions have only been communicated privately to Chinese Bitcoin exchanges. But a couple of Bitcoin exchanges have now announced that they are shutting down. And leaked documents suggest that the rest will be required to do so before the end of the month. Chinese users will be given a chance to withdraw their funds before the exchanges shut down.

“BTCChina encourages customers to withdraw their funds as quickly as possible,” one of the exchanges wrote in a Friday tweet. “Customers can withdraw their funds whenever they want.”

Bitcoin has always been something of an awkward fit for China, which strictly regulates financial markets and limits the flow of funds overseas. Chinese officials have apparently concluded that Bitcoin has become too popular as a way to circumvent those regulations.

Reuters quoted a Friday comment by a senior Chinese official that may explain the Chinese government’s thinking:

Li Lihui, a senior official at the National Internet Finance Association of China and a former president of the Bank of China, told a conference in Shanghai that global regulators should work together to supervise cryptocurrencies.

“Digital tokens like bitcoin, ethereum that are stateless, do not have sovereign endorsement, a qualified issuing body or a country’s trust, are not legal currencies and should not be spoken of as digital currencies,” he said. “They can become a tool for illegal fund flows and investment deals.”

He said there should be a distinction between digital currencies, which were being studied and developed by authorities such as the Chinese central bank, and digital tokens such as bitcoin. Digital currencies developed by authorities could be used for good, with the right regulation, he said.

The Internet finance association was set up by China’s central bank, and according to Reuters, it “urged members to abide by Chinese laws and not deal in cryptocurrencies.”

If Li’s comments reflect the thinking of the Chinese authorities, that suggests that this is much more than a temporary halt to Chinese Bitcoin trading. The government seems to be laying the groundwork to ban independent digital currencies from the Chinese economy altogether.

If so, that will raise some awkward questions for other Chinese entrepreneurs participating in the blockchain industry. For example, four of the world’s largest Bitcoin mining operations are based in China. Miners process Bitcoin transactions and, in exchange, are rewarded with newly created bitcoin. They also exercise significant power over changes to the Bitcoin protocol. So if Chinese mining pools were shut down, it would have a big impact on the distribution of power in the global Bitcoin economy.

Right now, it doesn’t look very likely that other countries will follow China’s lead. US regulators clearly signaled their acceptance of Bitcoin in 2013, and since then there has been little sign that they’re changing their minds. Investors have poured more than a billion dollars into cryptocurrency startups since then.

While a US cryptocurrency ban isn’t likely, we are likely to see increased regulatory scrutiny of the cryptocurrency economy—especially from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC enforces securities laws, and recently there have been a number of new cryptocurrency offerings that look suspiciously like illegal stock offerings. The SEC issued a warning about the issue in July and is widely expected to do more on the issue in the coming months and years.

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The Cassini spacecraft, after spending 13 nearly flawless years revealing a complex, ringed gas giant along with its extensive array of enigmatic moons—and finding two worlds capable of supporting life—died on Friday morning. It expired after setting its engines on full thrust and flying directly into the maw of Saturn. It was 19 years old.

The spacecraft made its final significant maneuver on Monday, flying near enough to Saturn’s largest moon Titan to nudge Cassini into a collision course with the planet. Cassini took its final image on Thursday and on Friday morning began accelerating to more than 140,000km/hour. There was no return.

Cassini had to die this way. Its fuel reserves were nearly gone. Scientists didn’t want to take a chance that, however improbably, some life from Earth had survived on board the spacecraft for 20 years and might one day contaminate one of the planet’s moons, such as Titan or Enceladus.

Early Friday, as Cassini began flying deeper into Saturn’s atmosphere, molecules from the planet struck the spacecraft. Slowly, it began to heat up. The spacecraft’s attitude control thrusters, fighting to keep Cassini’s antenna pointed back toward large arrays on Earth amid the turbulence, lost their struggle. At about 1,500km above the planet’s cloud tops, Cassini began to tumble, falling, falling… falling. NASA scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory lost contact with the spacecraft at 7:55am ET. It was burning and soon would break apart, becoming part of the gas giant it has so closely studied for so long.

Key discoveries

NASA’s Cassini orbiter, along with the Huygens lander built to descend to the surface of Titan, launched on October 15, 1997, aboard a Titan IVB/Centaur rocket and reached an orbit around Saturn on July 1, 2004. That marked the beginning of the end of a more than two-decade journey, beginning in the 1980s, to get the probe into space and onto Saturn.

Voyager 1 had flown by Saturn in 1980, and Voyager 2 followed in 1981. These two iconic probes raised more questions about Saturn than they answered, especially about its moons. Titan, in particular, intrigued scientists with its thick nitrogen atmosphere—the only other world in the Solar System to have a nitrogen-rich atmosphere like Earth’s. What might lie there?

“Voyager was a tease,” planetary scientist Carolyn Porco, who worked on the imaging team for the Voyager mission, and led it for Cassini, told Ars. “It was like a fleeting moment in time when you could just see, briefly, what was there. We were left with all these questions. And they were important questions.”

Questions like: Why is one half of that moon dark, but the other light? Why are they so weirdly shaped? What are all these things in the rings of Saturn? What could it tell us about the formation of the Solar System? And might the atmosphere on Titan allow for some kind of exotic life forms to exist?

During its 13 years at Saturn, Cassini sent back more than just dazzling photos. It found that Titan’s nitrogen-rich atmosphere had a surface pressure 1.6 times that of Earth and had large, methane lakes. The presence of nitrogen along with methane, and ultraviolet light reaching the surface, created conditions where rich organic chemistry might flourish.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Similarly, Cassini answered key questions about the upper atmosphere of Saturn—mostly hydrogen but about 7 percent helium—and elucidated the nature of its fine rings. It explored the more than five dozen moons orbiting the planet. And upon closer inspection, Cassini found small moons dancing in gaps between the rings, gaps those tiny moons had created with their own small gravity fields.

And Cassini discovered a huge surprise at one of Saturn’s smaller moons, Enceladus. Large, icy geysers were spewing into space. Later, scientists confirmed that a relatively large ocean must exist on the moon, beneath the ice. Cassini’s mission was modified to fly through the geysers, and that small world, only about 500km across, is now considered one of the best places in the Solar System to look for extant life.

Survivors

For the scientists who study Saturn and the outer Solar System, Cassini represents a glorious achievement. While they are sad about Cassini’s demise, it has been a tremendous run. “It’s the finality of this enormous effort that we all personally have put into Cassini,” Porco said. It was three decades of her life. “It’s kind of like a death in the family. It will feel that way.”

Cassini leaves few survivors out in the Solar System. There is the Juno spacecraft, exploring the Jovian atmosphere for clues about the inner workings of the largest planet in the Solar System. It will fly into Jupiter within a couple of years. On January 1, 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 before heading ever deeper into space and following the Voyagers out of the Solar System.

And beyond that? NASA is developing an orbiter mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa and, potentially, a lander. And while the agency is making progress, neither of these $3 billion to $4 billion missions is guaranteed to fly. Therefore, after Cassini’s final transmission this morning, scientists will have lost more than a long-time, faithful friend in the outer Solar System. The worlds out there will have become quite a bit darker.

Listing image by NASA

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Google is taking on the irritating trend of auto-playing web videos with its Chrome browser. Starting in Chrome 64, which is currently earmarked for a January 2018 release, auto-play will only be allowed when the video in question is muted, or when a “user has indicated an interest in the media.”

The latter applies if the site has been added to the home screen on mobile, or if the user has frequently played media on the site on desktop. Google also says auto-play will be allowed if the user has “tapped or clicked somewhere on the site during the browsing session.”

“Chrome will be making auto-play more consistent with user expectations and will give users more control over audio,” writes Google in a blog post. “These changes will also unify desktop and mobile web behaviour, making web media development more predictable across platforms and browsers.”

In addition, Google is adding a new site muting option to Chrome 63 (due for release in October), which allows users to completely disable audio for individual sites. The site muting option will persist between browsing sessions, allowing for some degree of user customisation.

However, Apple’s upcoming Safari 11 browser—which features its own auto-play blocking tools—will allow for more granular control, enabling users to mute auto-playing media with sound, or block auto-playing media entirely on specific sites or on the Internet as a whole.

Aside from removing the annoyance of auto-playing videos (those that follow you down the page as you scroll are particularly evil), Chrome’s blocking tools will also help users consume less data and power on mobile devices.

Developers still keen on using auto-play video can consult Google’s guidelines, which include:

• Use auto-play sparingly. Auto-play can be a powerful engagement tool, but it can also annoy users if undesired sound is played or they perceive unnecessary resource usage (e.g. data, battery) as the result of unwanted video playback.
• If you do want to use autoplay, consider starting with muted content and let the user unmute if they are interested in exploring more. This technique is being effectively used by numerous sites and social networks.
• Unless there is a specific reason to do so, we recommend using the browser’s native controls for video and audio playback. This will ensure that auto-play policies are properly handled.
• If you are using custom media controls, ensure that your website functions properly when auto-play is not allowed.

In addition to auto-play blocking, Google is planning to implement ad-blocking inside the Chrome browser. The Google ad-blocker will block all advertising on sites that have a certain number of “unacceptable ads.” That includes ads that have pop-ups, auto-playing video, and “prestitial” count-down ads that delay content being displayed.

Google, which refers to the ad-blocker as an ad “filter,” is using a list of unacceptable ad types provided by the Coalition for Better Ads, an advertising industry trade group. The ad-blocker is due to launch in 2018.

This post originated on Ars Technica UK