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Elon Musk’s toke could cost him his Pentagon security clearance

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Recreational marijuana use may be legal in ten states, but those in the corridors of power aren’t keen on top-level CEOs lighting up in public. After getting heat from NASA, Elon Musk — who took a drag on Joe Rogan’s podcast in September — could now be in hot water with the Pentagon, too. An anonymous US official has told Bloomberg that Musk’s federal security clearance is currently under review thanks to that toke.

The SpaceX CEO has secret-level access because of his leadership role at the private aerospace company, which has continued to secure military contracts (including a recent deal worth $297 million for three future launches of US defence payloads) after that now-infamous incident.

The same official said Musk had refiled his SF-86 security form requiring him to come clean about any illegal drug use over the past seven years. Over 20 million viewers watched him smoke on a YouTube video of Rogan’s podcast, so it’s not like Musk can lie. The fact is, as Bloomberg points out, marijuana use remains a federal crime. SpaceX has declined to comment on the fiasco and Musk’s more likely to share his thoughts on Twitter.

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The Morning After: Tim’s Apple joke

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Re-review.Nintendo Switch revisited: Two years makes a big difference

Nintendo’s bet on portability has paid off well: While other consoles are stuck under your TV, the Switch lets you bring your favorite games just about anywhere. Despite specs that don’t seem to compare to high-powered 4K-ready systems, it maintains a growing selection of innovative new games combined with more indies and classics joining the party every day.

Right about… now.SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is coming back to Earth

After a week or so attached to the ISS, the Demo-1 mission of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is headed back home. Early Friday morning it undocked, and starting at 7:30 AM ET, you can join us to watch the NASA TV broadcast as it eventually splashes down in the Atlantic Ocean for recovery.

Four and a half years after it first landed on Android.Sony finally brings PS4 Remote Play to iPhone and iPad

Four years since the app first appeared on Sony phones, PS4 Remote Play has come to iOS, meaning you can remotely play on your PS4 console, provided the WiFi holds strong. And you know what? It works even better than Remote Play on the PlayStation Vita.

It’s a charming alternative to the Fitbit Versa, but it has its issues.24 hours with Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Active

Samsung’s first keenly priced smartwatch is in our hands, or should we say on our wrists. There’s a lot to like, but we have some early concerns with battery life.

Where do we start?The best games for PC

Gaming on your PC means console-beating graphical performance — if you’ve got the coin for it. We’ve tried to be broad with our recommendations here on purpose. There are so many great games out there for your PC, consider this as a starting point.

Say goodbye to the infamous vault?Disney’s streaming service will include its entire movie library

According to Disney CEO Bob Iger, Disney+ “will house the entire Disney motion picture library, so the movies that you speak of that traditionally have been kept in a ‘vault’ and brought out basically every few years will be on the service.”

Check his Twitter bio.Tim Cook is in on the Tim Apple joke

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Valve laid off 13 employees working on virtual reality

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“Last month, 13 full time employees were let go and a portion of our contractor agreements were terminated,” a spokesperson said. “It’s an unfortunate part of business, but does not represent any major changes at the company. We thank those affected for their contribution and wish them well in future endeavors.”

UploadVR found the status of some of the laid off employees. One of them was Nat Brown who was instrumental in developing Steam’s ability to support external GPUs. Rob Rydberg, yet another employee who worked on virtual reality, indicated on his LinkedIn account that he left Valve in February. The other affected employees reportedly worked on the Steam Controller.

Valve developed the SteamVR platform for virtual reality devices and helped HTC create the first Vive headset. The company is still beefing up its platform with new and improved features, but it’s worth noting that HTC’s newer headsets don’t use SteamVR Tracking anymore.



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Update Chrome now as attackers are ‘actively exploiting’ a bug

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Google Chrome tends to auto update quickly and silently, but you may want to make sure you’re on the latest version right now, as the company announced a zero-day vulnerability that it said attackers are “actively exploiting.” As Chrome security engineer Justin Schuh explained in a series of tweets, the thing that makes this different from previous exploits that usually targeted Flash, is that the browser needs to be restarted for the fix to take effect.

If you’re on Chrome’s stable channel, then the latest update should install version 72.0.3626.121 with the fix.

Google also alerted users to another exploit affecting the Windows operating system. According to its blog post, it may only impact people running Windows 7 32-bit systems, and those people are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of the OS, or install patches when/if Microsoft makes them available (seriously, it’s time to move on).



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J Dilla-inspired sampler makes it easy to create beats on your phone

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If you ask Elf Audio’s Marek Bereza, many music samplers are too fussy — you’re focused more on making tiny edits than, well, making music. He’s trying to remedy that with his new Koala sampler. Inspired by the late J Dilla’s knack for creating tracks with a BOSS SP-303, the iOS app is not only designed to be easy to understand, but doesn’t give you ways to micro-manage your tunes. You just record samples with your device’s mic, create sequences and perform those sequences with effects like pitching and stuttering. You can resample if you’d like to put your audio bites through effects, such as dropping them down an octave.

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Watch SpaceX’s Crew Dragon return to Earth starting at 2 AM ET

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Just about a week after launching on its inaugural voyage, the SpaceX Crew Dragon has one more step to complete: returning to Earth. First, the uncrewed spacecraft will undock from the International Docking Adapter on the ISS that it has called home for the last few days, which is scheduled to occur at about 2:31 AM ET. Once all the hooks are released, as NASASpaceflight.com explains, it will complete a separation burn and prepare to deorbit.

Part two is the actual sea landing, with splashdown in the Atlantic scheduled to occur around 8:45 AM ET, although the timing could change based on wind and other variables. NASA TV will cover things live on its streaming channel (embedded below) starting at 2 AM, and then coming back on the air at 7:30 AM ET.

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Disney’s streaming service will include its entire movie library

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“The service, which I mentioned earlier is going to launch later in the year, is going to combine what we call library product, movies, and television, with a lot of original product as well, movies and television. And at some point fairly soon after launch it will house the entire Disney motion picture library, so the movies that you speak of that traditionally have been kept in a ‘vault’ and brought out basically every few years will be on the service,” said Iger during the meeting.

Classic Disney films can be harder to find than you would expect. In anticipation of its streaming service, Disney will be pulling all of its titles from Netflix later this year, including Pixar films. Many classic Disney films in the Disney vault, such as Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, and Cinderella are not available to rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes or any other service. You may finding yourself scouring eBay for a Blu-ray version of an iconic Disney title from your childhood.

The launch of Disney+ will mean that all 57 feature films produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios will be available to stream at some point. You can also expect the vast library of Disney-owned films to be included in streaming service, such as those in the Star Wars and Marvel universes.

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YouTube adds fact checks to search results on sensitive topics

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“As part of our ongoing efforts to build a better news experience on YouTube, we are expanding our information panels to bring fact checks from eligible publishers to YouTube,” a spokesperson from YouTube told Engadget. “We are launching this feature in India and plan to roll this out in more countries as time goes on.”

YouTube information panel

According to YouTube, it won’t be fact checking individual videos — a task that would require a gargantuan effort and an uncountable number of human hours to accomplish. Instead, the fact checks will surface in search results as a sort of preemptive attack on any video spreading misinformation.

The articles used for the new information panel will have to pass through a markup process to be used. That process requires fact-checkers to add a couple of lines of code to their articles to allow Google’s web crawlers to quickly pick up vital information like what claim is being checked and whether it is true or false. Once an article passes that check, the information can be surfaced by YouTube in search results with no additional lift required by the publisher.

YouTube has implemented a number of changes in recent years in an attempt to combat videos that perpetuate false information. The company came under fire for enabling the rise of people like Alex Jones and the spread of false stories like the conspiracy theory that mass shooting survivor David Hogg was an actor. YouTube has since launched a video feed for verified news organizations and has added information cues under controversial videos that source related information from Wikipedia. The compnay recently took to removing advertisements from anti-vaccine videos to keep channels from profiting off misinformation.

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Music streaming services are fighting a big royalties increase

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Early last year, the CRB approved a rate hike that would increase royalties by 43.8 percent over a five-year period. The decision wasn’t officially published until this February, at which time a 30-day window for appeals opened, and it looks like the major players are not going to keep quiet.

Well, all but one. Variety reports that Apple has no plans of issuing an appeal. That’s not entirely surprising given that Apple already offered suggestions for how to “fix” royalties.

In a joint statement Spotify, Pandora and Google wrote, “If left to stand, the CRB’s decision harms both music licensees and copyright owners.” But when the CRB first proposed the new rates, some likened protesting it to declaring war against songwriters. Time will tell if musicians see these appeals as an attack, but this isn’t a new fight. Just a few years ago, Taylor Swift temporarily pulled her music from Spotify. And clearly, this won’t be resolved anytime soon.

Here’s the full statement from Spotify, Google and Pandora:

“The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), in a split decision, recently issued the U.S. mechanical statutory rates in a manner that raises serious procedural and substantive concerns. If left to stand, the CRB’s decision harms both music licensees and copyright owners. Accordingly, we are asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to review the decision.”

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Facebook only cares about privacy because it has to

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That’s great and all, but why is Facebook suddenly interested in taking this approach? After all, the company has built its entire business model around people sharing things publicly.

While Zuckerberg has been hinting at this new strategy in recent earnings calls, it’s now clear that it’s no longer just an idea. It will be the reality for Facebook and its family of apps, which include Instagram and WhatsApp, in the near future. For the past two years, Facebook has been under heavy scrutiny from governments and the public for a slew of data-privacy scandals, so it’s easy to see why it wants to make a major shift. Facebook needs a change, and it needs it quick. But that may come with troubles of its own.

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Zuckerberg points to WhatsApp as the perfect example of how Facebook will rework its platform to private, encrypted services. The problem is, WhatsApp is far from perfect. Just last year, the spread of fake news on the app was blamed for inciting lynchings in India. And that wasn’t the only case connecting WhatsApp to violence in Southeast Asia. In Myanmar, pervasive hate speech and endless hoaxes have become quite common on WhatsApp, causing issues throughout the country.

It’s a serious enough problem that Facebook’s gone as far as to limit users’ ability to forward messages to multiple chats at once, in hopes that it will reduce the amount of misinformation being shared.

What happened in India and Myanmar shows how dangerous even private messaging services can be, because they have the potential to create social bubbles that bad actors can tap into. That’s going to present a challenge for Facebook as it looks to redefine itself, and it will need to be cautious about how it approaches its new strategy. “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever,” Zuckerberg said. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about.”

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One of the areas Zuckerberg says Facebook will start focusing more on going forward, along with encrypted conversations, is small groups. “Many people prefer the intimacy of communicating one-on-one or with just a few friends,” he said. “People are more cautious of having a permanent record of what they’ve shared.” Similar to WhatsApp, though, groups can create problems — including people using them to create racist, xenophobic bubbles on Facebook.

It’s not clear yet how Facebook plans to police these issues, and it doesn’t have the best track record. Zuckerberg knows this, which is why he said he is “committed to working openly and consulting with experts across society as we develop this.” Still, for the time being, his ideas don’t seem to offer any solutions to the many problems Facebook has created.

Zuckerberg also talks about how ephemeral content (posts that don’t last forever) are key to Facebook’s evolution. That should come as no surprise given the rise of Instagram Stories, which now has over 500 million daily active users. That’s more than double of Snapchat — you know, the app Facebook essentially ripped off to create Stories. Zuckerberg says this doesn’t mean the News Feed is going away anytime soon, but it does raise the question: How does Facebook plan to turn its privacy-focused strategy into cash? Again, that’s a question that Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to have an answer for at the moment. Presumably, Facebook will still need to make money. And you have to wonder, if you’re not giving up your privacy, what will you have to give up for the company to turn a profit?

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