The next phase of the mission will be crucial for Tianwen-1. In 2011, China successfully launched the Yinghuo-1 Mars mission and reached parking orbit aboard a Ukrainian Zenit rocket. However, the burns designed to send it from that orbit to Mars failed, leaving it stranded over Earth. It eventually re-entered our orbit and disintegrated over the Pacific in January, 2012.
Adding to the difficulty, China is attempting its first Rover landing on Mars, something only the US has managed so far. The red planet is littered with the remains of previous failed attempts by Europe, the former USSR and the US equally. Success would thus crown China as a top nation in terms of space exploration.
Tianwen-1 has become the second of three missions to launch during the current window of Mars passing relatively close Earth. The UAE successfully launched the Arab world’s first mission to Mars just three days ago, and the US will launch its Perseverance rover to Mars on July 30th. All three missions are expected to arrive in February of 2021.
In the testing environment, known as WW, the bots take actions like trying to buy and sell forbidden items, such as guns and drugs. The bot can use Facebook like a normal person would, conducting searches and visiting pages. Engineers can then test whether the bot can bypass safeguards and violate Community Standards, according to the statement. The plan is for engineers to find patterns in the results of these tests, and use that data to test ways to make it harder for users to violate Community Standards.
Facebook has long said it’s been developing methods to thwart harassment, criminal activity, misinformation and other types of wrongdoing on the platform. At the 2018 Facebook F8 conference, Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer said the company was investing heavily in artificial intelligence research and finding ways to make it work at a large scale with little to no human supervision. To Facebook’s credit, WES appears to be evidence of that.
Facebook is rolling out a set of experimental features to select English-language Pages after using celebrities’ accounts for their initial testing. One of those experimental features is a brand new layout for its mobile apps that puts the focus on the Page’s name, description and Follower count. As you can see in the comparison of the old (left) and the new (right) layouts above, the new one bears a resemblance to Instagram and Twitter profile pages. It looks more like a social media profile than a website now, with a Page’s details and Stories at the top to replace the About and the Page Transparency sections.
The new Page design completely does away with the Like button and the number of Likes — as TechCrunch notes, users can Like a Page and then unfollow it after, making Like numbers an unreliable metric. The Follower count represents the actual number of people getting a Page’s updates on their Feed, which means it can more accurately show a Page’s reach than the number of Likes can.
Education Policy Center deputy director Stephanie Coyle issued a statement for the NYCLU, explaining how facial recognition can affect Black and Brown students’ experiences. Facial recognition technologies can still be woefully inaccurate when it comes identifying PoCs and women, leading to mistaken identities and potentially false charges. Putting them in schools with students who are still growing and changing rapidly could therefore be a recipe for disaster.
She said:
“…Schools should be an environment where children can learn and grow, and the presence of a flawed and racially-biased system constantly monitoring students makes that impossible.
This is especially important as schools across the state begin to acknowledge the experiences of Black and Brown students being policed in schools and funneled into the school-to-prison pipeline. Facial recognition is notoriously inaccurate especially when it comes to identifying women and people of color. For children, whose appearances change rapidly as they grow, biometric technologies’ accuracy is even more questionable. False positives, where the wrong student is identified, can result in traumatic interactions with law enforcement, loss of class time, disciplinary action, and potentially a criminal record.”
The Lockport City School District, as you’d expect, is disappointed in the lawmakers’ decision. Superintendent Michelle Bradley told Lockport Union-Sun & Journal that that the district believes there’s no valid basis to prevent it from using technology that’s already been approved. She said facial recognition is even more important now that schools have to use multiple entrances to enable temperature screening as a safety measure against COVID-19.
Bradley also defended Aegis and downplayed critics’ security concerns: “Contrary to the constant misrepresentations by opponents of the AEGIS System, the AEGIS System does not in any way record or retain biometric information relating to students or any other individuals on District ground.”
The Delta Symbol has been in use since 1961 by the Air Force’s department, and this image explains the various elements that reference the military branches, rockets launching and its “core values.” As far as the motto, it’s “Semper Supra,” which means “Always Above.”
Twitter didn’t identify the politician, but reports indicate it was the Dutch Party of Freedom leader Geert Wilders. The company didn’t address which other accounts may have had their inboxes accessed. The hack ensnared a number of high-profile users, including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Kanye West. The update does suggest that Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s messages were not caught up in the hack, a scenario that has lead to much speculation about how much worse the attack could have been.
We believe that for up to 36 of the 130 targeted accounts, the attackers accessed the DM inbox, including 1 elected official in the Netherlands. To date, we have no indication that any other former or current elected official had their DMs accessed.
Still, the fact that hackers were able to access the accounts of a former president and current presidential candidate has caused major concern among lawmakers, who have demanded investigations into the company and how the hacks were carried out. The FBI has also confirmed it’s conducting an investigation.
Twitter previously blamed the hack on a “social engineering attack,” but hasn’t directly commented on speculation that one or more of its employees may have been complicit in the hack. The company also revealed that hackers were able to export extensive account data for eight users, but said none of them were verified.
She’s not alone. Featured streamers like RobotGiggles are going from having 47,545 followers on Mixer, to around 6,100 followers on Twitch. LenaAxios will have to walk away from her 122,423 Mixer followers for just 5,900 on Twitch. And for those few streamers who are making the leap to Facebook Gaming, it’ll still be a difficult journey regaining their clout. TimDubz, a pro level partner on Mixer with 25,141 followers currently only has 190 on his Facebook Gaming page.
Microsoft
Of course, these numbers will likely grow as these creators devote more time to their new gaming homes. But for many, it’ll likely take months, perhaps years, to regain their footing. That won’t be a huge deal for casual streamers, but anyone who was actually making a living off of the service will need to hustle for sponsorships and paying gigs.
No matter where they end up, Mixer streamers won’t be able to recreate the feeling of being part of an underdog streaming service. It started out as Beam and gained a reputation for incredibly fast streaming thanks to its “FTL” technology. After Microsoft acquired the company in 2016, it rebadged as Mixer and went to great lengths to compete with Twitch, the incumbent streaming leader. Last year, Microsoft paid leading personalities like Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and Soleil “Faze Ewok” Wheeler to move over to the service exclusively.
Despite how much Microsoft tried, it couldn’t dent Twitch’s market lead. According to data from Streamlabs, Mixer only reached around 81.4 million streaming hours watched, compared to 3.1 billion from Twitch, a billion from YouTube gaming and 553.8 million from Facebook Gaming, the newest challenger. And even a streaming titan like Ninja could only attract 3 million followers on his Mixer account, even though he had amassed 14.7 million on Twitch. As compelling as these personalities are, it seems like many viewers would rather stick with the platform they already know.
Just before Microsoft announced that Mixer would be shutting down, former employee Milan Lee documented his experience with racism at the company on Twitter. After making a formal complaint against his manager for racist comments, the company ultimately decided not to punish her. Mixer responded with a seemingly earnest apology, but the only action the company took was announcing its shut down the following day. That made the move seem doubly disappointing to many fans.
Mixer’s small size also made it a more intimate home for streamers. “For a lot of people, Mixer was just a streaming platform, a way for them to try and make a bit of money on the side or a stepping stone in their streaming careers,” streamer JRMATRIX wrote in a farewell letter. “For the rest of us, Mixer was one thing and one thing only, it was a home. It was our home.”
When asked why he chose to jump to Twitch instead of Facebook Gaming, JRMatrix, whose real name is Nate Flynn, told us that he’s trying to keep the community he began building on Mixer. “When we heard about the merger with Facebook Gaming, and the manner in which we found out we all felt a little sold out,” he said. “And I think it really tainted a lot of people’s view of the Facebook Gaming platform, so the majority of us opted for what we felt was a more secure future with Twitch.”
He added, “The thing I’ll miss most about Mixer I think is the atmosphere of the platform as a whole. With it being much smaller it always felt like a much closer knit community to me, and that really came through in the way streamers helped each other out on the platform. I know that community ethic exists on Twitch too, but given the size of the platform it always felt a little out of reach to me as a relative newcomer to streaming. Having that with me now, the prospect of streaming on a larger platform seems less daunting. It feels like we’re bribing that community spirit with us over to Twitch.”
Google has delayed the date when it will start ranking all websites based on their mobile versions. At the start of March, the company said it would switch to mobile-first indexing this September. The company now plans to make the transition in March 2021.
“We realize that in these uncertain times, it’s not always easy to focus on work as otherwise, so we’ve decided to extend the timeframe to the end of March 2021,” the company said, alluding to the coronavirus pandemic as the main reason for the delay.
Tesla had to make some pretty severe cuts to preserve its earnings in Q2, given the widespread effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. While Tesla’s North American factories were shuttered, the company furloughed thousands of workers and cut salaries by up to 30 percent, suspended contract assignments and even delayed performance reviews so that it wouldn’t have to pay out bonuses or pay increases to deserving employees until the end of July. That turned out to be a pretty raw deal for many Tesla workers, who were forced to return to the job before shelter-in-place orders were lifted, but hey, it made Musk significantly richer.
Despite the factory shutdowns in the first half of the year, Tesla says that its Fremont factory is already back at capacity, and plans to pump out 90,000 Model S and Xs this year as well as “increase total Model 3 / Model Y capacity from 400,000 to 500,000 units per year,” according to the company’s earnings statement. For it’s part, the Shanghai factory is slated to produce another 200,000 model 3s as well. Work is still underway on the company’s Berlin factory, as well as two additional US-based factories.
“We’re very excited to announce that we’re going to be building our next Gigafactory in Texas,” Musk said during the earnings call, stating that the facility will be located about 15 minutes outside of Austin, “right on the Colorado River.”
“We’re gonna have a boardwalk where there will be a hiking, biking trail,” he continued. “It’s gonna basically be an ecological paradise — birds in the trees, butterflies, fish in the stream. And it’ll be open to the public as well.”
The Austin factory is expected to produce the company’s upcoming Cyber Truck, the Tesla semi, and Model 3/Y for the Eastern half of North America, while the California factory will soon pick up production on the Tesla Roadster, Musk explained.
Google is late to the party when it comes to reactions. Facebook was one of the first companies to implement the feature in 2016 when it introduced them to give people more ways to respond to posts quickly. One year later, the company started testing reactions in Messenger, and they’ve been a part of the app ever since. For better and worse, they’ve also long been a long fixture within iMessage.
In the same announcement, Google highlighted some other features it recently added to Messages. In addition to suggesting text and emoji based on the most recent message you received, Smart Reply will now recommend stickers as well. They’ll appear above the part of the interface where you enter text. The feature is currently only available in English.
Another relatively new addition is a built-in image editor that allows you to doodle on any photos you take with your phone. To access it, you need to snap a photo using the full camera interface, not the compact one that shows up when you first go to send a picture.
Again, most of Messages’ newest features have been available in other chat apps for a while. Nonetheless, they’re important additions if Google is ever going to convince people to use Messages over any of the dozens of other apps they can use to message their friends and family. If you don’t have access to reactions already, be patient. As with most software rollouts, it may be a while before you get the latest update.
