The UAE has joined an exclusive club of countries that have sent a robot to orbit Mars. Called "Hope", the car sized probe will zoom around the red planet doing "science data gathering" for the next two years, studying the planet's atmosphere and weather. It's a pretty big deal for the UAE as the probe entered Mars orbit in the 50th anniversary of the various emirates becoming the UAE and is being used a symbol for getting more Emiratis into STEM, transitioning the country away from an oil based industry. Imagine having a government that wants to move away from basing their economy on fossil fuels... Anyways, the next 10 days are exciting for space nerds as if everything goes to plan, rovers from the USA (Perseverance) and China (Tianwen-1) will land on Mars.
NBN has announced more places they're gonna spend almost $3b on to replace FTTN with fibre. Go check out the article for a list, there's too many to paste here. With these new suburbs added to the ones shortlisted back in October, there will be around 200,000 premises eligible to move to 21st century internet. The catch is you will need to order a service with a download speed of at least 250mbit and you'd need to commit to a minimum contract term. When this program kicks off isn't decided yet, but damn it's embarrassing they already have to overbuild FTTN areas. Would have saved everyone a lot of messing around if they simply put FTTP in these areas in the first place.
For today's dose of dystopia we have Beverly Hills police playing music when they realise they're being live-streamed to discourage activists from filming them. Why play music? We all know that if you chuck in almost any sort of licensed music in a video on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram, it'll get removed pretty damn quickly so the copyright mafia get their cut. This cop seems to think that if he plays some tunes off his phone, when the person recording him uploads the interaction to social media, it'll get taken down due to having copyrighted music in the background and he avoids extra scrutiny. Cheeky bastard. Only problem however is that Instagram updated its policy to be less draconian and added some common sense to their algorithm when judging if a video should be removed, raising the bar for removal.
Bloomberg has a solid article about Tim Cook being Mr. Teflon with the US government, when his contemporaries at other massive tech companies seem to always be stepping in dog shit. Zuck & Facebook are basically the devil incarnate, Bezos & Amazon are the 21st century slave traders treating their employees like trash, Pichai & Google are Orwellian data hoarders and Satya Nadella's Microsoft have been there and done that when it comes to government regulation. In the same time, Tim Cook comes out looking like a saint who just has our best interests at heart, despite leading a company that's worth over US$2t and outsourced all its manufacturing overseas. The bloke is a master diplomat as much as he is a shrewd businessman.
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