Everyone knows that we’re residing in a surveillance state that might make Orwell himself shake his head, nevertheless it seems like a minimum of one corporate on this house has long gone a bit of rogue. In keeping with studies, AI surveillance start-up Flock <<insert gratuitous “What the Flock?” funny story right here>> has put in a minimum of 200 of its car-tracking cameras on public roads in South Carolina on my own. That’s a major whoopsie, particularly because it’s unlawful to put in the rest on state infrastructure with out permission, which it seems that Flock failed to acquire. South Carolina government are creating a excellent display of being outraged about this, nevertheless it type of rings hole to us, particularly since Flock now claims that 70% of the inhabitants (of the United States, we presume) is roofed by means of their era. Additionally, police departments around the nation are in love with Flock’s carrier, which permits them to correctly monitor the actions of possible suspects, which in fact is everybody. No phrase on whether or not Flock must take away the rogue cameras, however we’re now not keeping our breath.
It seems like we’ll quickly be writing the obituary we was hoping would nonetheless be a few years away, as the danger that NASA will be capable of reestablish significant communications with Voyager 1 appears to be diminishing with each and every passing day. We reported on the most recent “flipped-bit glitch” again in February, however the issue dates again to November, when Voyager 1 began sending again gibberish as a substitute of its same old payload of medical information and spacecraft telemetry. The breakdown is considered led to by means of a corrupt little bit of reminiscence within the Flight Knowledge Machine; NASA deliberate to unravel this by means of commanding the craft to change again to a method ultimate used when it did its planetary flybys all the ones a long time in the past, nevertheless it’s now not transparent whether or not they ever did this or what the consequences had been. We’ll think the silence speaks for itself. We all know that all the Voyager program is gone the purpose of diminishing returns, and that the cash NASA spends coaxing half-century-old {hardware} 24 billion kilometers away into generating effects may well be put to higher use in different places. However however, having one thing that a ways away to keep in touch with turns out like a very good approach to increase the abilities we’ll want as we increase humanity’s footprint additional into the galaxy, so perhaps it’s well worth the expense. Only a concept.
Additionally in house information however a bit of bit nearer to house, the mortally wounded Ingenuity helicopter would possibly fly not more, nevertheless it nonetheless has paintings to do. In contrast to some other fresh lander spacecraft, Ingenuity controlled to stick on its toes after crashing into the Martian regolith, leaving its sun panel uncovered to the Solar and retaining it powered up. That’s the excellent news; the unhealthy information is that about the one factor it could possibly do now could be use its downward-pointing navigational cameras to observe the grains of sand and mud go with the flow by means of within the wind. It’s precious geological paintings, surely, however in comparison to hovering during the skinny Martian setting and breaking report after report, it kind of feels a moderately ignominious retirement. Lemonade out of lemons, any individual?
No one ever stated being a Linux geek was once going to be simple, however as the ones folks who’ve voluntarily defenestrated or depomified their computer systems can inform you, it’s now not all the time a very easy row to hoe. That’s very true with content material advent; whilst the Mac and Home windows crowd can (most often) simply plug and play, getting a Linux gadget to cooperate with audio and video modifying {hardware} and device generally is a bit painful. Thankfully, we have now Venn Stone’s Interfacing Linux to assist us out. Venn has spent the decade or so development a Linux-based AV manufacturing studio and is now sharing the information and tips discovered alongside the way in which, in addition to development a group of like-minded content material creators. In case you refuse to worship on the altar of Redmond or Cupertino, this may well be where for you.
And in any case, ultimate week (5th merchandise) we famous the inside track that the United States govt is pushing programmers to eschew programming languages it deems to be “reminiscence unsafe.” This mainly boiled all the way down to “C/C++ unhealthy” as a result of they result in buffer overflow mistakes that may be exploited by means of malware. Now, the United States Nationwide Safety Company — sure, that NSA — has pop out with a useful listing of different languages, that have higher memory-safety options and are utterly now not compromised whatsoever. Rust enthusiasts shall be happy, surely, as will Java programmers. We had been a bit of stunned to peer C# at the listing, despite the fact that, and we think the inclusion of Ruby and Python will carry some eyebrows, with the latter surely drawing the ire of a undeniable Hackaday editor.
