Author: peterjang73

Semi-trucks are the fuel line of our economic structure, transporting goods to and from retailers and manufacturers all around the world. Operators of these massive vehicles often come face-to-face with nature’s wrath, more specifically, high winds. Axicle Engineering developed an anti-rollover fifth wheel system designed to prevent semi-truck operators from fully rolling over due to these high winds. The Tractor Anti Rollover System (TARS) would keep the driver and truck on the road while it unlatches and detaches the trailer when met with an “unrecoverable rollover condition.” Axicle claims a 99.99% accuracy with the help of its algorithm and sensors. Currently, TARS is designed for class-8 trucks. Earlier this year, Axicle used a Boeing 777 to test out its TARS system by using the jet engines to knock down the semi-truck and its load. The system worked just as promised, keeping the truck upright while the trailer was tipped over. If you’re a semi-truck driver, what do you think of this technology? Let us know in the comments.

Click here to watch the Boeing 777 engine demonstration: https://youtu.be/XCpRjwpwAVc

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A federal judge has ordered all internet service providers in the United States to block three pirate streaming services operated by Doe defendants who never showed up to court and hid behind false identities.

The blocking orders affect Israel.tv, Israeli-tv.com, and Sdarot.tv, as well as related domains listed in the rulings and any other domains where the copyright-infringing websites may resurface in the future. The orders came in three essentially identical rulings (see here, here, and here) issued on April 26 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Each ruling provides a list of 96 ISPs that are expected to block the websites, including Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. But the rulings say that all ISPs must comply even if they aren’t on the list:

It is further ordered that all ISPs (including without limitation those set forth in Exhibit B hereto) and any other ISPs providing services in the United States shall block access to the Website at any domain address known today (including but not limited to those set forth in Exhibit A hereto) or to be used in the future by the Defendants (“Newly Detected Websites”) by any technological means available on the ISPs’ systems. The domain addresses and any Newly Detected Websites shall be channeled in such a way that users will be unable to connect and/or use the Website, and will be diverted by the ISPs’ DNS servers to a landing page operated and controlled by Plaintiffs (the “Landing Page”).

That landing page is available here and cites US District Judge Katherine Polk Failla’s “order to block all access to this website/service due to copyright infringement.”

“If you were harmed in any way by the Court’s decision you may file a motion to the Federal Court in the Southern District of New York in the above case,” the landing page also says.

“Gone to Great Lengths to Conceal Themselves”

The three lawsuits were filed by Israeli TV and movie producers and providers against Doe defendants who operate the websites. Each of the three rulings awarded damages of $7.65 million. TorrentFreak pointed out the rulings in an article Monday.

The orders also contain permanent injunctions against the defendants themselves and other types of companies that provided services to the defendants or could do so in the future. That includes companies like Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Google, and Namecheap.

In all three cases, none of the defendants responded to the complaints or appeared in court, the judge’s rulings said. “Defendants have gone to great lengths to conceal themselves and their ill-gotten proceeds from Plaintiffs’ and this Court’s detection, including by using multiple false identities and addresses associated with their operations and purposely deceptive contact information for the infringing Website,” the rulings say.

The defendants are liable for copyright infringement and violated the anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the judge wrote, describing the infringement as follows:

Through the Website, Defendants have been re-broadcasting and streaming Plaintiffs’ original content, broadcasting channels and TV services which are only authorized for broadcasting and/or viewing in the territory of the State of Israel and under a license. The Infringing Broadcasting includes original content produced and owned by Plaintiffs, mostly in Hebrew, and also from major studios in the United States and elsewhere, licensed to Plaintiffs for broadcasting exclusively in Israel (except as expressly licensed for broadcast in the United States).

Rulings Further Target Web Hosts and Banks

The plaintiffs are United King Film Distribution, D.B.S. Satellite Services (1998), HOT Communication Systems, Reshet Media, and Keshet Broadcasting. While the plaintiffs “transmit their programming in an encrypted form,” the defendants’ “various services and hardware permit end-user consumers to bypass the Plaintiffs’ encryption to view Plaintiffs’ content,” the rulings said.

The judge ordered domain registrars and registries to transfer the domain names to the plaintiffs. The rulings include injunctions against “third parties providing services used in connection with Defendants’ operations,” including web hosts, content delivery networks, DNS providers, VPN providers, web designers, search-based online advertising services, and others.

Financial institutions face similar bans on doing business with the blocked websites. The rulings directly target the defendants’ monetary accounts, saying that plaintiffs “shall have the ongoing authority to serve this Order on any party controlling or otherwise holding such accounts” until they have “recovered the full payment of monies owed to them by any Defendant under this Order.” This applies to PayPal, banks, and payment providers in general.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

Technology is ever-advancing throughout virtually every industry, and while some four-wheeled-gadgets such as lunar rovers and health-monitoring electric cars tend to get most of the attention, segments like farm robotics can often be just as cool. One interesting piece of tech in particular is the InsightTRAC, a robot that autonomously roams almond orchards seeking and shooting down pest-infested almonds. 

The bug-zapping bot was created for the sole purpose of improving tree health and increasing harvesting. Almonds that remain on trees after harvest become a key food source for many pests, especially Navel Orangeworms. These lingering almonds are called mummies. InsightTRAC was invented to combat the frustrating traditional removal process of mummies; whacking them using long sticks or violently shaking a tree to remove them. This new patent-pending rover, however, is designed to seek mummies autonomously, and shoot them down using earth-friendly biodegradable pellets. The system is used for winter sanitation to prep for the budding season. 

InsightTRAC can operate 24/7 identifying and tracking trees and can provide farmers with data to optimize their tree profitability. InsightTRAC is currently focusing on almond growers with plans to expand to other branches of the industry and beyond. Learn more at insighttrac.com 

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Rocket Lab just did something we’ve never seen before.

Rocket Lab sent 34 satellites to orbit today (May 2) with its two-stage Electron launcher, which lifted off from the company’s New Zealand site at 6:49 p.m. EDT (2249 GMT). Impressive enough, but it was the action in the downward direction that was unprecedented.

After sending the satellites on their way, the Electron’s first stage came back down to Earth under parachutes. About 15 minutes after liftoff, as the booster glided toward the Pacific Ocean, a Sikorsky S-92 helicopter sidled up close to it and snagged the parachute line with a hook. The chopper later hauled the booster to a recovery ship, which will transport the hardware back to terra firma for inspection and analysis. 

“Absolutely incredible stuff there!” Rocket Lab Senior Communications Advisor Murielle Baker said during today’s launch webcast. “We have successfully caught that Electron booster underneath the parachute!” 

Related: Rocket Lab and its Electron booster (photos)

This dramatic action is all part of Rocket Lab’s effort to make Electron first stages reusable, an achievement that would reduce costs and increase launch frequency, company representatives have said.

Space fans are already familiar with reusable rockets thanks to SpaceX, which commonly lands and reflies the first stages of its Falcon 9 rocket (as well as those of its Falcon Heavy, which has launched just three times to date). Falcon 9 first stages land propulsively, using engine burns to steer themselves to soft, vertical touchdowns on land or “droneship” platforms at sea. 

But the 59-foot-tall (18 meters) Electron is too small to do that; the first-stage boosters cannot carry sufficient fuel to have enough left over for landing operations, Rocket Lab representatives have said. So the company settled on the helicopter-snag strategy.

Rocket Lab has been steadily building up to today’s historic catch. The company recovered Electron first stages after soft ocean splashdowns on three recent missions, and it has caught falling dummy boosters with a helicopter during a series of drop tests.

Today’s mission — the 26th overall for Rocket Lab and Electron — was delayed several times as Rocket Lab waited for weather to clear in the catch zone, which was about 170 miles (275 kilometers) off the New Zealand coast. The company has a history of giving its flights playful names, and it dubbed this one “There And Back Again.”  

The 34 satellites that flew on “There And Back Again” — more than on any previous Electron mission — were provided by a variety of customers, including Alba Orbital, Astrix Astronautics, Aurora Propulsion Technologies, E-Space, Spaceflight Inc. and Unseenlabs, Rocket Lab wrote in a mission description. 

All were deployed as planned into a sun-synchronous orbit about 323 miles (520 kilometers) above Earth by an hour after liftoff, Rocket Lab representatives announced via Twitter this evening. Once that happens, the total number of satellites lofted by Electron to date will rise to 146. 

Electron won’t be the only launcher in Rocket Lab’s stable for much longer, if all goes according to plan. The company is developing a larger rocket called Neutron, which is scheduled to fly for the first time in 2024. Neutron is designed to be partially reusable from the outset; its first stage will make Falcon 9-like propulsive landings, Rocket Lab representatives have said.

Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook.  

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If you’re one of the millions of students applying for student aid every year, then chances are Facebook—and Facebook’s parent company Meta—know about it.

That’s the main takeaway from a new investigation by The Markup, which found a tiny, invisible piece of code called the “Meta Pixel” lurking on the website where students apply for Free Application for Federal Student Aid, also known as FAFSA. The FAFSA folks have a pretty robust presence on both Facebook and Instagram and they run an equally robust number of ads across both. Presumably, someone at the Department of Education plopped the pixel on the page in order to better target those ads, using the Pixel to better know who was visiting, and when.

Data points like students’ first and last names, email addresses, and the fact that they applied for aid were all sent back to the company, according to code that the Markup posted for anyone to peruse.

If you peek at it, you might notice that the data is “hashed” in a way that, on paper, removed those identifying details. But it’s also worth noting that hashed data can easily be traced back to the device that produced it, sometimes pretty easily, even for a company without Meta’s tech prowess. After The Markup contacted the U.S. Department of Education about the practice, the agency yanked the offending code from FAFSA’s application page. This still leaves countless aid applicants’ data in Meta’s hands.

Even if you’ve never heard of a Meta Pixel before, there’s a good chance you’ve stumbled onto one somewhere across the web. Aside from the student aid page, there are more than one million websites in the United States alone that have that tiny piece of tech onboard. Meta’s pitch to site operators, in cases like these, is that the Pixel can track users as they roam across a given webpage so that the businesses and brands running these sites can retarget those users across properties like Facebook or Instagram. But the company’s privacy policies are kind of a gnarled mess and even Meta doesn’t know where that data might end up or how it might be used for targeting in the future. The company’s data policies make it clear that it retains this data for years on end.

Gizmodo reached out to Meta for comment on this story and we’ll update this post when we receive a reply. In a statement to The Markup, a spokesperson noted that the company “continues to proactively educate advertisers in sensitive verticals on how to properly set-up our business tools.”

What’s unclear is whether these attempts to educate the Department of Education are actually going anywhere. Government agencies are notoriously dense when it comes to anything technology, and when it comes to comprehending tech privacy, things get even worse. Getting this piece of tech off one site is a good start, but we still have a long way left to go.

We’ve entered the timeline where the world’s richest troll, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has bought Twitter. The deal, which ran him a cool $44 billion, will pretty much give the tech bro free rein over the Bird App. Now, he can “authenticate all humans” like he intends to, pushing us ever closer to our seemingly inevitable dystopian future. Many folks online were upset by this buyout, with some saying the news would motivate them to ditch the bird’s nest for good.

In the wake of Musk’s purchase, conversation on the app turned to where people flying the coop might go, and one name was floated as a viable alternative more than any other. Discord, once seen as a niche messaging tool primarily for gamers, began trending on Twitter as many advocated for a mass exodus to the platform. Whether such an exodus actually manifests or not, the chatter indicates that perceptions around Discord have shifted, and that the app might be poised for a mainstream breakthrough.

Discord had humble beginnings. Launched in 2015 as a modern take on old-school chat rooms like ICQ and those once found on AOL, the instant messaging app was built for gamers to talk games with other gamers. Servers are divided into different channels or chat rooms dedicated to specific topics, like Elden Ring speedrunning for instance, and depending on a server’s settings, often the only way to join one is if a moderator invites you to it. This somewhat closed-off, community-oriented structure contributed to the perception that Discord was a gamer’s app, though once the pandemic hit, it saw a huge spike in popularity, and clearly not just among gamers.

By mid-2021, the platform had as many as 150 million monthly active users. Of course, people were playing video games more—hello Animal Crossing—and the pandemic saw more people using Discord to play tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons remotely as well. But Discord’s usage was also expanding well beyond gaming-centered circles. After all, folks were locked indoors, and Discord’s a great way to keep in touch with friends over long distances. It’s an even better method to organize communities around niche topics and subcultures you care about, gaming-related or not.

Twitter, on the other hand, is just different. Originally built as a microblogging platform to share “what’s happening” in your world with anyone who follows you, it’s since grown into a space for both advocacy and bigotry to proliferate. Musk’s complicated history of mocking pronoun usage and clamping down on Tesla dissent have left many wary of how this “free speech absolutist” might run the Bird App. And now that Musk has scooped Twitter up, some believe he will make the platform worse in the long-run. There’s even some discussion that banned racists and far-right extremists like Donald Trump and Milo Yiannopoulos could be replatformed under Musk’s regime, which doesn’t bode well for marginalized queer folks like myself.

As such, there was lots of chatter online around Discord serving as a potential safe haven from the gremlins lurking in Twitter’s digital shadows. Some folks support the idea of moving to the instant messaging platform, saying Musk is liable to “fuck up” Twitter’s usability. While Discord can be overwhelming for those who want to be active in many communities, it seems some folks, at least, would take the closed-community aspect of Discord over the shouting-in-a-public-square vibe Twitter regularly gives off.

Still, Discord isn’t without its own issues. Many chastised the app’s servers as “walled gardens” in which harmful rhetoric can—and often does—fester. There’s also the problem of supporting artists, many of whom use Twitter as a way to get their creations in front of people and monetize their content. In many fundamental ways, Discord and Twitter just aren’t the same and don’t fill a similar hole.

Kotaku has reached out to Discord for comment.

Despite the back and forth over whether Discord is the new Twitter, the chatter cements the instant messaging app into the mainstream. Twitter is often called a public square, and Musk believes it’s “the digital space where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” If folks are talking more openly about migrating to Discord, it might be a matter of time before celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and the like start their own servers.