The billionaire space race is continuing to expand across the globe. Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin has announced plans to expand its operations to "Europe and beyond," the Financial Times reports. Part of this growth hinges on finding a site for an international launch facility — the company has already put down roots in Texas, Washington, Florida and Alabama — but the new location hasn't been chosen yet. It's also actively looking for fresh acquisitions and partnerships outside of the US in areas such as manufacturing and software.
"We're looking for anything we can do to acquire, to scale up to better serve our customers," Bob Smith, Blue Origin CEO, said. "It's not a function of size — rather how much it accelerates our road map of what we're trying to get done." Last year, Blue Origins bought New York-based Honeybee Robotics, a move that appears successful: The space-based robotics company was part of the Blue Origin team that recently received $3.4 billion to build the lunar lander for NASA's third Artemis mission. Blue Origin's biggest competitor, Elon Musk's SpaceX, is handling the first and second Artemis moon landings.
Though Blue Origin was the first to launch, land and reuse a rocket successfully, it has fallen behind its rival due to hold-ups with building its launchers. Blue Origin's plans for a more global footprint might help them catch up with SpaceX's progress. Amazon's Project Kuiper also plans to use Blue Origin's rocket New Glenn for at least 12 launches between 2024 and 2029 after a few years of delays.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/blue-origin-is-planning-to-open-new-launch-sites-outside-the-us-122518232.html?src=rss
In a baffling move over the weekend, Elon Musk said the company would restrict unverified accounts to reading 600 posts per day – and new accounts to only 300 tweets daily. Meanwhile, Twitter will allow verified accounts to read 6,000 posts each day. For most people, that means, short of paying for Twitter Blue, they can spend about a minute or two on Twitter before encountering a "rate limit exceeded" error. Less than two hours later, Musk said Twitter would "soon" ease the limits to 8,000 for verified accounts and 800 for those without Twitter Blue.
Musk claimed the "temporary" limits were in place to address "extreme levels of data scraping" and "system manipulation." The day before, Twitter began preventing people not logged into the site from viewing tweets. Musk did not say what "new" means in the context of an account, nor did he say how long Twitter plans to restrict users.
It’s a challenging change to Twitter when it’s courting advertisers and paid users. Fewer eyes for ads and fewer benefits for paying users.
– Mat Smith
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The company is also reportedly working on new hearing-health features.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says Apple is working on bringing new health features to its AirPods family. The first could be a hearing test. Already, AirPods support audiogram profiles, so iOS can tune earbuds to adjust for hearing loss. Some apps, like Mimi, already tap into this feature. Gurman added Apple is exploring how to market the AirPods Pro as a hearing aid since the FDA made it easier for Americans to buy over-the-counter options last year.
Apple is also working on an earbud feature to measure your body temperature. The company already introduced a built-in temperature sensor with the Watch Series 8 and Watch Ultra. But a sensor can get a more accurate temperature reading from the ear canal than the wrist. However, Gurman warns both features are “several months or even years away.”
When Cowboy introduced its Adaptive Power update earlier this year, I wondered when a new model would arrive. The answer is, well, today. The new variant encourages a more upright design for a relaxed Dutch riding position. It also has a wider saddle — a feature at the top of our wish list for the Belgian company’s latest iteration. The e-bike has a wireless charging phone mount, and, like all its models, its companion app integrates with Google Maps. The Cowboy Cruiser is available for an “introductory price” of £2,690 (roughly $3,400) in black or white.
Gfycat is shutting down. Snap, Gfycat’s parent company, said it plans to shut down the GIF database and delete all user content in a few short weeks. “The Gfycat service is being discontinued,” a notification at the top of the website reads. Gfycat’s impending demise won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has tried to use the site in recent months. In May, Motherboard reported Snap had allowed Gfycat’s security certificates to expire. The oversight meant the platform temporarily became inaccessible to most internet users.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-twitter-limits-unverified-users-to-seeing-600-posts-a-day-113153535.html?src=rss
Amazon's Prime Day starts on July 11th, and based on the early access deals we've seen so far, you can expect some exceptional savings. Now, the retailer is adding a small additional Prime Day bonus with a $5 promo credit if you purchase a $50 Amazon eGift Card for someone special (yourself included).
You'll want to check the lengthy terms & conditions, but the basic idea is this: If you purchase a $50 (or higher) eGift card between today and July 10th at 11:59 PST, you'll get a $5 promotional code that must be cashed in by August 25th, 2023. The main things to note are that it can only be applied to products sold by Amazon.com (not third parties) or any e-books, and that you won't be refunded the $5 promo credit if you return or cancel that order.
If you're good with all that, there are already a number of options to use it. For example, Amazon's Fire HD tablet is $75 or half off the regular price, and other Amazon products like its all new Echo Buds and Eero Pro mesh WiFi router carry significant savings. Other stellar deals include the 2023 Motorola Razr+ flip phone at $850 ($150) off and the Apple AirPods Pro (2nd generation) at $199 ($50 off). If you really want to max out that $5 promo in terms of percentage, you can get Samsung's Pro Plus 128GB microSD memory card for $9 ($14 - $5), making it exactly half off.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-is-offering-a-5-credit-when-you-buy-a-50-egift-card-for-prime-day-094827231.html?src=rss
When premium e-bike maker Cowboy introduced its Adaptive Power update earlier this year, Engadget’s Mat Smith wondered when a new model would arrive. We have the answer today as the company announced the Cowboy Cruiser. The new variant encourages a more upright design for a relaxed Dutch riding position. It also includes a wider saddle — a feature that was at the top of our wish list for the Belgian company’s latest iteration.
The Cowboy Cruiser weighs 19.3 kg (42.5 lbs) and includes comfort grips and a “distinctive raised and curved handlebar to facilitate a natural hand position.” Its saddle is wider and has an increased gear ratio compared to previous models. The e-bike has a wireless charging phone mount, and, like with all of its models, its companion app integrates with Google Maps. In addition, it has a removable battery, carbon belt, mudguards and “puncture-resistant” 47mm tires. Of course, all of the company’s models have crash detection.
Cowboy
With its lineup getting more crowded, Cowboy renamed its existing e-bikes, “making it easier for customers to find the e-bike which best suits their personal needs.” The original C4 model is now called the Cowboy Classic, and the C4ST becomes the Cruiser ST.
The Cowboy Cruiser is available starting today for an “introductory price” of £2,690 ($3,393.43). You can buy it in black and sand colorways from the company website or any of its 300 retail partners across Europe.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cowboy-cruiser-e-bike-offers-a-more-upright-ride-000010102.html?src=rss
Earlier this week, reports began surfacing that Valve was refusing to publish games with AI-generated art and other content. Over the weekend, the company finally commented on the matter. In a statement shared with IGN, Valve spokesperson Kaci Aitchison Boyle said the company is not trying to “discourage the use of [AI] on Steam.” Aitchison Boyle attributed the confusion to Valve “working through” how to account for the technology in its existing review process, which is a “reflection” of current copyright law.
"Our priority, as always, is to try to ship as many of the titles we receive as we can,” Aitchison Boyle said. "We welcome and encourage innovation, and AI technology is bound to create new and exciting experiences in gaming. While developers can use these AI technologies in their work with appropriate commercial licenses, they can not infringe on existing copyrights."
Aitchison Boyle added that Valve has been refunding submission credits to those who ran afoul of the company’s current rules on account of their game’s use of AI-generated content. It’s not surprising to see Valve attempt to get ahead of what is quickly becoming one of the thorniest issues in tech. We’ve already seen generative AI create headaches for the music industry. In April, for instance, streaming services like Spotify and YouTube spent the better part of a week responding to a copyright claim from Universal Music Group after someone uploaded a viral AI-generated Drake song to their platforms.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/valve-wont-publish-games-that-feature-copyright-infringing-ai-assets-204703804.html?src=rss
Gfycat is shutting down. In a notice spotted by Hacker News (via The Verge), Snap, Gyfcat’s parent company, said it plans to shut down the GIF database and delete all user content in a few short weeks. “The Gfycat service is being discontinued,” a notification at the top of the website reads. “Please save or delete your Gfycat content by visiting https://www.gfycat.com and logging in to your account. After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com.”
The news of Gfycat’s impending demise won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has tried to use the site in recent months. In May, Motherboard reported Snap had allowed Gfycat’s security certificates to expire. The oversight meant the platform temporarily became inaccessible to most internet users. However, even before that period of downtime, there were questions about whether anyone was still working at Gfycat. Over on Reddit, there are reports dating back months and even years of broken uploads and an unresponsive support team. The shutdown is a reminder nothing lasts, not even one of the most popular websites on the internet. That's well worth remembering as other platforms suffer from a different sort of neglect.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gfycat-is-shutting-down-on-september-1st-180741599.html?src=rss
In his latest Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports Apple is working on new health features for its line of audio products. The first of those would allow your AirPods to conduct a hearing test. As The Verge notes, AirPods already support audiogram profiles, which iOS can use to tune the output of the earbuds to adjust for hearing loss. Right now, you can generate those profiles through third-party apps like Mimi, so if Apple were to move forward with its own test, it would be another instance of the company “Sherlocking” a feature from a third-party developer.
Separately, Gurman writes Apple is exploring how to position and market the AirPods Pro as a hearing aid after the FDA made it easier for Americans to buy over-the-counter options last year. He reports the company recently hired engineers with experience working on traditional hearing aids as part of that initiative.
The other new AirPods feature Apple is working on is a way for the earbuds to measure your body temperature. A built-in temperature sensor was one of the features the company introduced with the Watch Series 8 and Watch Ultra. As for why Apple would replicate a feature already found on one of its existing products, a sensor can get a more accurate temperature reading from the ear canal than the wrist.
Gurman warns both features are “several months or even years away.” In the more immediate future, he reports Apple plans to refresh the AirPods Pro with a USB-C charging case, adding that all of the company’s audio products will eventually move away from Lighting as well. All of that is part of a move Apple must make to comply with the EU’s new common charging standard. “Despite the USB-C shift, I wouldn’t anticipate the imminent launch of all-new AirPods Pro hardware,” Gurman notes, pointing to the fact Apple only just refreshed the earbuds last year.
Before then, AirPods users can at least look forward to the new software features Apple said it would introduce alongside iOS 17. Those include a new button press to mute yourself on calls and improvements to device switching. Gurman speculates Apple could also permanently lower the price of its second-generation AirPods to $99, down from $129, to make them more competitive against low-cost options from Samsung, Sony and Amazon.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apples-next-airpods-pro-could-feature-a-built-in-temperature-sensor-162531033.html?src=rss
Nobody said dragging one of the largest government bureaucracies to ever exist into the digital era was going to be easy but the sheer scale and myriad variety of failings we have seen in recent decades have had very real, and near universally negative, consequences for the Americans reliant on these social systems. One need look no further than at how SNAP — the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — has repeatedly fallen short in its mission to help feed low-income Americans. Jennifer Pahlka, founder and former executive director of Code for America, takes an unflinching view at the many missteps and groupthink slip-ups committed by our government in the pursuit of bureaucratic efficiency in Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.
The lawmakers who voted to cut the federal workforce in the 1990s, just as digital technology was starting to truly reshape our lives, wanted smaller government. But starving government of know-how, digital or otherwise, hasn’t made it shrink. It has ballooned it. Sure, there are fewer public servants, but we spend billions of dollars on satellite software that never goes to space, we pay vendors hundreds of thousands of dollars for basic web forms that don’t work, and we make applying for government services feel like the Inquisition. That’s the funny thing about small government: the things we do to get it — to limit government’s intrusion into our lives — have a habit of accomplishing the opposite.
Take, for example, an application for food stamps that requires answering 212 separate questions. That’s what Jake Solomon at Code for America discovered when he tried to find out why so few Californians in need enrolled in the state’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Many of the questions were confusing, while others were oddly specific and seemed to assume the person applying was a criminal. “Have you or any member of your household ever been found guilty of trading SNAP benefits for drugs after September 22, 1996? Have you or any member of your household ever been found guilty of trading SNAP benefits for guns, ammunition, or explosives after September 22, 1996?” It would often take up to an hour for people to fill out the entire form. They couldn’t apply on a mobile phone; the application form, called MyBenefits CalWIN, didn’t work on mobile. Lots of the people Jake observed tried to complete the form on computers at the public library instead, but the library computers kicked you off after half an hour. You had to wait for your turn to come again and pick up where you left off.
SNAP is a federal program that states are responsible for administering. The smaller the jurisdiction in charge, the more likely that the program will be attuned to local needs and values. California, along with nine other states, has chosen to further devolve administration to its individual counties, putting the burden of managing client data on fifty-eight separate entities. To handle that burden, the counties (with the exception of Los Angeles) formed two consortia that pooled IT resources. When it became clear that clients should be able to apply online, each consortium then contracted for a single online application form to save money. It turned out to be quite expensive anyway: MyBenefits CalWIN, the form Jake studied, cost several million dollars to build. But at least that got divided across the eighteen counties in the consortium.
What those several million dollars had gotten them was another question. Jake and his Code for America colleagues published a “teardown” of the website, over a hundred screenshots of it in action, with each page marked up to highlight the parts that confused and frustrated the people trying to use it. (To be fair, the teardown also highlighted elements that were helpful to users; there were just far fewer of them.) The teardown was a powerful critique. It was noticed by anti-poverty advocates and the press alike, and the ways in which the counties were failing their clients started to get a lot of attention. Jake should not have been popular with the people responsible for MyBenefits CalWIN. Which was why he was surprised when HP, the vendor managing the website, invited him to a meeting of the consortium to present his work.
The meeting brought representatives from each of the counties to a business hotel in downtown Sacramento. It was only after Jake finished showing them his observations that he realized why he’d been invited. The HP representative at the meeting presented a variety of options for how the consortium might use its resources over the coming year, and then the county representatives began engaging in that hallmark of democracy: voting. One of the questions up for a vote was whether to engage some of HP’s contracted time to make MyBenefits CalWIN usable on a mobile phone. Fresh off Jake’s critique, that priority got the votes it needed to proceed. Jake had done the job he’d been invited to do without even knowing what it was.
What struck Jake about the process was not his success in convincing the county representatives. It was not that different from what Mary Ann had achieved when her recording of Dominic convinced the deputy secretary of the VA to let her team fix the health care application. The HP rep was interested in bringing to life for the county reps the burdens that applicants experienced. Jake was very good at doing that, and the rep had been smart to use him.
What Jake did find remarkable was the decision-making process. To him, it was clear how to decide the kinds of questions the group discussed that day. SNAP applicants were by definition low-income, and most low-income people use the web through their phones. So at Code for America, when Jake developed applications for safety-net benefits, he built them to work on mobile phones from the start. And when he and his team were trying to figure out the best way to phrase something, they came up with a few options that sounded simple and clear, and tested these options with program applicants. If lots of people stopped at some point when they filled out the form, it was a sign that that version of the instructions was confusing them. If some wording resulted in more applications being denied because the applicant misunderstood the question, that was another sign. Almost every design choice was, in effect, made by the users.
The counties, on the other hand, made those same choices by committee. Because each of the eighteen counties administers the SNAP program separately, the focus was on accommodating the unique business processes of each separate county and the many local welfare offices within the counties. It wasn’t that the county reps didn’t care about the experience of their users—their vote to start making MyBenefits CalWIN work on mobile phones was proof of that. But the process the consortium followed was not constructed to identify and address the needs of users. It had been set up to adjudicate between the needs of the counties. The result had been, for years, an experience for clients that was practically intolerable.
Ever since the founding of the United States, a core value for many has been restricting the concentration of government power. The colonists were, after all, rebelling against a monarchy. When power is concentrated in the hands of one person or one regime, the reasoning goes, we lose our liberty. We need to have some government, so we’ll have to trust some people to make some decisions, but best to make it hard for any one person to do anything significant, lest that person begin to act like a king. Best to make sure that any decisions require lots of different people to weigh in.
But as Jake saw, the way you get 212 questions on a form for food assistance is not concentrated power, it’s diffuse power. And diffuse power is not just an artifact of the complexities federalism can bring, with decisions delegated down to local government and then aggregated back up through mechanisms like the county consortia. The fear of having exercised too much power, and being criticized for it, is ever present for many public servants. The result is a compulsion to consult every imaginable stakeholder, except the ones who matter most: the people who will use the service.
A tech leader who made the transition from a consumer internet company to public service recently called me in frustration. He’d been trying to clarify roles on a new government project and had explained to multiple departments how important it would be to have a product manager, someone empowered to direct and absorb user research, understand both external and internal needs, and integrate all of it. The departments had all enthusiastically agreed. But when it came time to choose that person, each department presented my friend with a different name, sometimes several. There were more than a dozen in all.
He thought perhaps he was supposed to choose the product manager from among these names. But the department representatives explained that all these people would need to share the role of product manager, since each department had some stake in the product. Decisions about the product would be made by what was essentially a committee, something like the federal CIO Council that resulted in the ESB imperative. Members would be able to insist on what they believed their different departments needed, and no one would have the power to say no to anyone. Even without the complications of federalism, the project would still be doomed to exactly the kind of bloat that MyBenefits CalWIN suffered from.
This kind of cultural tendency toward power sharing makes sense. It is akin to saying this project will have no king, no arbitrary authority who might act imperiously. But the result is bloat, and using a bloated service feels intrusive and onerous. It’s easy to start seeing government as overreaching if every interaction goes into needless detail and demands countless hours.
Highly diffuse decision-making frameworks can make it very hard to build good digital services for the public. But they are rooted in laws that go back to long before the digital era.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-recoding-america-jennifer-phalka-metropolitan-books-food-stamps-143018881.html?src=rss
In a surprising turn of events, AMD has announced a new processor for its aging AM4 platform. The Ryzen 5 5600X3D brings the company’s 3D V-Cache technology to a six-core, 12-thread processor. Moreover, AMD plans to sell the CPU for a modest $229, but there’s a catch. The company will only offer the new processor through Micro Center, a US retailer that, as Ars Technica notes, doesn’t ship most of what it sells to online shoppers. What’s more, stock of the 5600X3D will be limited, with sales of the CPU to end once Micro Center runs out of supplies.
All of that is a shame because the 5600X3D could be a great upgrade for those looking to extend the life of their AM4 motherboard and get a bit of extra gaming performance. Like the 5800X3D, the 5600X3D trades slower clock speeds and more power consumption for a 96MB L3 cache. With the 5800X3D, that’s a combination of features that makes for a processor that is slower at some tasks, but generally great for gaming. The expanded L3 cache frequently translates to less bottlenecking in games, meaning you can get the most performance possible from your GPU. Moreover, the fact that it's an AM4 processor means you can save on a new build since you won't need to go buy DDR5 RAM.
The 5600X3D will go on sale on July 7th.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amds-229-ryzen-5-5600x3d-is-a-micro-center-exclusive-220620613.html?src=rss
Twitter has begun aggressively limiting how many tweets users can view per day. On Saturday afternoon, Elon Musk said the company would restrict unverified accounts to reading 600 posts per day, and new accounts to only 300 tweets daily. Meanwhile, Twitter will allow verified accounts to read 6,000 posts each day. For most people, that means short of paying for Twitter Blue, they will be able to spend about a minute or two on Twitter before encountering a "rate limit exceeded" error.
Musk claimed the "temporary" limits were put in place to address "extreme levels of data scraping" and "system manipulation." The day before, Twitter began preventing people who aren't logged into the site from viewing tweets. Like the usage limit, Musk has claimed the login restriction will only be temporary, and that it was done in response to data scrapers. “Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,” Musk said Friday.
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day - Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day - New unverified accounts to 300/day
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/twitter-puts-strict-cap-on-how-many-tweets-users-can-read-each-day-182623928.html?src=rss
