Amazon is getting closer to being able to deploy Project Kuiper's broadband satellites. The company has just received key approval from the Federal Communications Commission, which it needs to be able to officially send 3,236 satellites to orbit and to begin Kuiper's satellite internet operations. As SpaceNews notes, Amazon secured an initial approval from the agency in 2020. The FCC gave it permission to launch thousands of Low Earth Orbit satellites, so long as it later secures regulatory approval for an updated orbital debris mitigation plan.

In the order (PDF), the commission said the updated plan satisfies the condition it gave the company when it granted its request back in 2020. This additional approval "will allow Kuiper to begin deployment of its constellation in order to bring high-speed broadband connectivity to customers around the world."

As part of its updated orbital debris mitigation plan, the FCC will require Amazon to submit a a semi-annual report "concerning the number of satellites launched and disposal reliability." If Amazon experiences disposal failure with satellites within a single year, it has to report that fact to the FCC, as well. In addition, the commission is requiring Project Kuiper to ensure that it will be able to deorbit its satellites after their seven-year mission is done. Making sure the decommissioned satellites are out of orbit is necessary to prevent them from colliding with the International Space Station and other inhabitable stations. 

Late last year, Amazon revealed that the first two Project Kuiper satellites will head to orbit aboard the maiden flight of United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan Centaur rocket. Vulcan Centaur is still currently under testing, but if all goes to plan, it'll fly for the first time in the next few months. 

Virgin Orbit's first orbital launch from UK soil, which was supposed to be a huge milestone for the company and for the region, may have ended in failure because of a component that cost around $100. According to SpaceNews, Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart has revealed at the SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View, California that the evidence so far points to a filter in the rocket's second stage engine getting dislodged and causing issues.

If you'll recall, the company launched its historic "Start Me Up" mission from Spaceport Cornwall on January 9th, and things seemed to flow smoothly at first. Virgin's LauncherOne rocket was able to detach from its carrier aircraft, and the company reported a successful stage separation. But soon, it became clear that the rocket wasn't able to reach orbit as planned. "[The rocket's] upper stage experienced an anomaly," a company spokesperson told Engadget at the time, and that "prematurely ended the first burn of the upper stage." They added: "This event ended the mission, with the rocket components and payload falling back to Earth within the approved safety corridor without ever achieving orbit." 

The LauncherOne rocket for the mission was carrying satellites from seven customers, including government entities. One of its payloads was a joint project between the UK Defense Science and Technology Laboratory and the US Naval Research Laboratory called CIRCE (Coordinated Ionospheric Reconstruction CubeSat Experiment). Virgin Orbit promised to conduct a full investigation into the root cause of the anomaly, but it didn't wait for results to come back before announcing that it was going to attempt another UK launch as soon as later this year. 

The company isn't done with its investigation, Hart said during the event, but he was confident enough to reveal the investigators' findings: "Everything points to, right now, a filter that was clearly there when we assembled the rocket but was not there as the second stage engine started, meaning it was dislodged and caused mischief downstream," he said. "This is like a $100 part that took us out." Hart also said that Virgin Orbit is no longer going to use that filter and that it's currently looking for potential fixes. 

Apple has expanded the internal testing for its Pay service's buy now, pay later feature to include its retail employees, according to Bloomberg. When the tech giant's experimental features make their way to its retail staff, that's typically a sign that it's going to be released in the near future. Apple Store workers started testing the company's credit card in 2019 a month before it became available, and staff at its HQ visitor center tested Tap to Pay shortly before the first partner companies like Square and PayPal launched support for the payment solution. 

The tech giant first announced the pay later functionality for Apple Pay at its WWDC event in June 2022. It was supposed to arrive alongside iOS 16, but the company changed its mind and rolled out the new mobile platform without the feature in tow. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported at the time that the company was having "fairly significant technical and engineering challenges in rolling out the service," which led to delays. 

When Apple introduced pay later, it said the payment option will give users a way to split the cost of purchases into four equal installments paid over six weeks with no additional interest or fees. Gurman now says that the company is also working with Goldman Sachs Group to offer an option that splits up the cost of large purchases into several months with interest on top. Seeing as the company even established its own subsidiary to conduct customer credit checks and approvals, it's not hard to believe that it has plans to introduce more pay later options in the future. 

Apple

Only adults 18 and older can sign up for Meta's Horizon Worlds at the moment, but according to The Wall Street Journal, that could change very, very soon. Meta is reportedly opening up its virtual reality social experience to younger players aged 13 to 17 as soon as this March as part of its efforts to grow Horizon's numbers and improve user retention. The Journal says it saw the information in a memo entitled "Horizon 2023 Goals and Strategy" in which Gabriel Aul, Meta's VP for the VR experience, outlined its goals for the first half of 2023. 

In the memo, Aul reportedly wrote that these younger users are the "true digital citizens of the metaverse" and that Meta needs to ensure that it serves them for Horizon to succeed. Meta spokesperson Joe Osborne told the publication that "[t]eens are already spending time in a variety of VR experiences on Quest, and [the company wants] to ensure that [it] can provide them with a great experience in Horizon Worlds as well, with age-appropriate tools and protections in place." 

Osborn didn't say what the experience will offer in the way of protecting young users. In 2021, The Journal reported that the company's own researchers found Instagram "harmful for a sizable percentage" of teens, particularly teenage girls. Meta paused its work on an Instagram for Kids as a result, and it has also launched a bunch of teen safety features for the app since then. It also automatically limited triggering or sensitive content for new users under 16. 

In addition to welcoming younger teens to Horizon, Meta is aiming to grow the game's monthly active users to 500,000 from 200,000 within the first half of the year. Perhaps more importantly at this point in time, it's targeting a retention rate of 20 percent. Apparently, Horizon had an 11 percent retention rate in January, which means only one in nine users returned to the experience the following month. Meta is hoping to achieve those goals by improving the service's reliability and performance and getting rid of bugs that may affect people's enjoyment. 

The company is aiming to release 20 new Horizon experiences built by third-party studios in an effort to win more people over, as well. Plus, it's apparently hoping to make the VR game a lot more accessible by rolling out a web version for mobile and desktopf by June. Meta teased the web version of the experience in the past, but the company missed its initial launch target last year. This year, the company is not only hoping to launch Horizon's web version within the next few months, it's also looking to have as many as 150,000 monthly cross-screen Horizon users in the first half of 2023. 

This is your chance to grab one (or some) of Amazon's Echo Show displays at a discount if you've been planning to buy any of them. Several models of the smart display are currently on sale, and Amazon is even offering most of them for almost half their original price. You can get the second-generation Echo Show 5 released in 2021 for $45 or 47 percent less than its retail price of $85. And, yes, all its available colors — Charcoal, Deep Sea Blue and Glacier White — are being sold at that price. Even the version for kids, which comes with parental controls, one-year free access to Amazon's Kids+ service, and a two-year worry-free guarantee, is available for $45 right now. The Echo Show 5 for kids will typically set you back $95. 

We gave the Echo Show 5 a score of 85 in our review and recommended it for those who want an alarm clock for their nightstand. It also has great sound quality for its size, and it lets you snooze your alarm by tapping the top part of the device.

If you're looking for a smart display for your living room or kitchen, however, the Echo Show 8 may be a better fit. It's currently on sale for $75, which is 42 percent less than its retail price of $130. The device, available in Charcoal and Glacier White, has an 8-inch HD touchscreen and a 13-megapixel camera, making it a better option for video calls. In comparison, the Echo Show 5 has a 5.5-inch screen and a 2-megapixel camera. We found Echo Show 8's audio to be superior to its smaller sibling's, as well. 

Finally, in case you'd rather have a wall-mountable smart display, the Echo Show 15 is also on sale for $225, or $55 less than retail. It has a 15.6-inch full HD screen surrounded by a white bezel. Since the whole device is housed in a black metal frame, it could look like a painting or a large picture frame if you use it to display artwork or photos. The device's large screen real estate also means you can display widgets and see various information at a glance. 

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Elon Musk may have to think of a lot more ways to make Twitter Blue appealing to potential subscribers if he wants the subscription service to be a major source of revenue. According to The Information, only 180,000 people in the US have been paying for a Twitter subscription by mid-January, and that's apparently around 0.2 percent of the website's monthly active users. The publication said it saw the information on a document, which also revealed that 62 percent of the company's paying users is from the US. That means Twitter has approximately 290,000 subscribers worldwide. 

Twitter Blue costs $8 a month for users who pay via web — or $7, if they pay for an annual subscription — and $11 for those who pay via Apple's or Google's app stores. Since the latter option gives the tech giants a cut of subscribers' payments, Twitter still only gets $8 a month from users overall. With the current number of paying users, the website is only set to earn $27.8 million a year from its subscription services. That said, Twitter has only just relaunched Blue in mid-December last year after a bumpy initial launch a month before that. It's bound to rack up more subscribers, though it remains to be seen if it can achieve the level of growth Musk wants to see. 

As The Information notes, Musk told Twitter employees last year that he wants half of the website's revenue to come from subscriptions. Since the company has to pay over $1 billion a year in interests alone from the loans Musk took out when he purchased the website, the executive is aiming to take in a revenue of $3 billion for 2023. Twitter has to have quite a lot of subscribers to earn half of that from Blue. One avenue the company is considering to earn more from its subscription services is to offer a higher-priced membership tier that allows users to browse the website with zero ads. Twitter is also reportedly planning to charge businesses $1,000 a month for their gold verification badges and an extra $50 a month for each account affiliated with them. 

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has blocked Wikipedia after slowing access to the website for 48 hours over content it considers "sacrilegious." A PTA spokesperson told Bloomberg that the agency has blocked the online encyclopedia for failing to remove said content within the past couple of days. 

The telecom authority revealed on February 1st that it approached the website with a court order to remove "blasphemous" material from its website. After Wikipedia didn't comply or appear before authorities, the PTA degraded access to the website for a couple of days and threatened to block it entirely if it didn't comply with its demands. The agency didn't publicly list the Wikipedia entries it doesn't want people in Pakistan to see.

As TechCrunch notes, Pakistan has been trying to exert more control over content found on various digital platforms. In 2020, the PTA temporarily banned TikTok due to "immoral and indecent" material before the short-form video app promised to moderate clips according to Pakistani "societal norms" and laws. It's worth noting that the Muslim-majority country has stringent blasphemy laws, and the punishment for breaking them includes life imprisonment and even death. 

In a blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation confirmed that Pakistan blocked Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects based on its internal traffic reports. "In Pakistan, English Wikipedia receives more than 50 million pageviews per month, followed by Urdu and Russian Wikipedias. There is also a sizable and engaged community of editors in Pakistan that contribute historical and educational content. A block of Wikipedia in Pakistan denies the fifth most populous nation in the world access to the largest free knowledge repository. If it continues, it will also deprive everyone access to Pakistan’s knowledge, history, and culture," the Foundation wrote. It's now calling on Pakistan's authorities to restore access to the Wikipedia website in the country. 

PTA's spokesperson told Bloomberg that the agency is still in talks with Wikipedia officials and that the agency will consider unblocking the website if it completely removes sacrilegious content.

Scientists and roboticists have long looked at nature for inspiration to develop new features for machines. In this case, researchers from the University of Toronto were inspired by bats and other animals that rely on echolocation to design a method that would give small robots that ability to navigate themselves — one that doesn't need expensive hardware or components too large or too heavy for tiny machines. In fact, according to PopSci, the team only used the integrated audio hardware of an interactive puck robot and built an audio extension deck using cheap mic and speakers for a tiny flying drone that can fit in the palm of your hand. 

The system works just like bat echolocation. It was designed to emit sounds across frequencies, which a robot's microphone then picks up as they bounce off walls. An algorithm that team created then goes to work to analyze sound waves and create a map with the room's dimensions. 

In the researchers' paper published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, they said existing "algorithms for active echolocation are less developed and often rely on hardware requirements that are out of reach for small robots." The researchers also said their "method is model-based, runs in real time and requires no prior calibration or training." Their solution could give small machines the capability to be sent on search-and-rescue missions or to previously uncharted locations that bigger robots wouldn't be able to reach. And since the system only needs onboard audio equipment or cheap additional hardware, it has a wide range of potential applications.

The researchers found during their tests that their technique is still not quite as accurate as systems that use bigger and more expensive hardware, such as GPS sensors or cameras. They're hoping to improve its accuracy in future versions, though, and to eliminate the need for the system to generate sounds. Instead, they want their system to be able to echolocate using the sounds the drone itself produces, such as the whirl of its own propellers. 

There was a time when HQ Trivia was on everyone's lips, and millions of people were playing it in hopes of winning some money from its prize pot. Then the trivia show app was beset by one problem after another until it fell off the radar, lost its audience and shut down. CNN announced last year that it ordered a documentary that'll tell the game show's story, with the promise of launching it in 2023. Now CNN Films, the news channel's motion picture division, has released a trailer for the documentary entitled Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia, which is scheduled to premiere on CNN on March 5th at 9PM ET/PT.

During the height of its popularity, HQ Trivia ran two games a day, and users could win part of the prize pot by answering several questions correctly in a row. It was hosted by Scott Rogowsky, though celebrities like The Rock and Kelly Clarkson would sometimes serve as guest hosts. In 2018, however, its controversial co-founder Colin Kroll passed away, and then Rogowsky left reportedly after having a disagreement with management over another hosting job he took. 

According to TechCrunch, more than half of HQ Trivia's staff also signed a petition to remove CEO Rus Yusupov, accusing him of mismanaging the startup. Yusupov then reportedly fired some of the people who led the petition before the company shut down following a failed acquisition in 2020. The trivia app quickly came back thanks to a new investor, but it only ran games once a week with a prize pot of $1,500. Today, the app is suspended in limbo and hasn't had a game since November 2022. 

The CNN documentary will be told through the point of view of Rogowsky, along with other insiders from the company. Based on what Salima Koroma, the docu's director said, we're in for an entertaining ride: "HQ Trivia was supposed to ‘revolutionize television’. But what happens when the people who are running it—'the smartest guys in the room’— don’t actually know what they’re doing? The CEOs who make the Vines and the WeWorks and the Twitters are hailed as the rockstars of our age. But a lot of them are simply emperors with no clothes on. It’s kind of absurd. And I wanted that absurdity to be felt all throughout the film."

Pay TV subscribers can stream the documentary when it premieres through CNN's website, its mobile apps and CNNgo. It will also be available for on demand streaming starting on March 6th.

Instagram might be considering the possibility of offering paid verification to users, based on code seen by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi. The developer shared screenshots in the app's code with TechCrunch, showing lines that say: "IG_NME_PAID_BLUE_BADGE_IDV" and "FB_NME_PAID_BLUE_BADGE_IDV." They clearly say "paid blue badge," most likely referencing the blue checkmarks verified users on the platform get. FB and IG stand for Facebook and Instagram, which could mean that Meta is thinking of verifying users for a fee across platforms. IDV, as TechCrunch notes, is a known acronym for "identity verification." Paluzzi has unearthed numerous unreleased features in the past, including a BeReal-like feature and in-app scheduler on Instagram.

In addition, the developer also reportedly discovered code referencing a new type of subscription, though it's unclear if it's directly connected to paid verification. Twitter Blue, as you know, is a subscription service that costs $8 to $11 a month and gives users access to the website's verified checkmark, along with some experimental features. Offering paid verification was one of the earliest moves Elon Musk made upon taking over Twitter, and it did make Blue look more appealing to prospective subscribers. Its launch was pretty disastrous, however, as the company didn't implement safeguards to prevent random users from impersonating companies and high-profile personalities. 

If Meta truly is developing paid verification, it has to find a way not to repeat Twitter's mistake. Especially since Instagram users might scramble to get their profiles verified, considering how hard it currently is to get a blue badge on the app. There's even a black market for Instagram verification, with people paying up to tens of thousands of dollars to get a blue tick next to their name. TechCrunch says Meta chose not to comment on Paluzzi's discovery, though, so whether it truly is working on paid verification is still up in the air.