The Eufy range of smart home products are popular because they're some of the few with internet connectivity that don't upload data to the cloud. Unfortunately, security consultant Paul Moore has exposed that Eufy's Doorbell Dual "is uploading thumbnail images of faces and user information to its cloud service when cloud functionality is not enabled" and "seems to be using facial recognition on the uploads". Anker (the manufacturer of the Eufy brand) said in a statement they'll change the phrasing of some options and be more clear that stuff will be sent to the cloud, but won't stop sending data to the cloud - the actual thing people are upset about! Sure, it's not the actual video and it may only be temporary, but when you say "no cloud" people expect nothing sent to the cloud.
The UK's announced changes to its Online Safety Bill. The biggest feature of the bill is the legal enforcement of online terms of service agreements. Hypothetically, if a social media company has in its ToS that racist and homophobic abuse or harmful health disinformation is banned, and it doesn't remove that content from its platform, the regulator can fine them up to 10% of annual turnover - and this is the watered down version after some MPs were afraid the bill was "legislating for hurt feelings". Social media companies will also need to remove illegal content - so anything that is actually illegal in the UK - and give users "controls to help them avoid seeing certain types of content to be specified by the bill". There's a bit more info on the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport's website (but no draft bill yet).
NASA's Orion spacecraft is still out there, 430,000km away from the Earth (farther than Apollo went in its day), taking amazing photos from the far side of the moon. NASA is rapt with how the mission is going, with 31 of the Artemis I mission's 124 baseline objectives complete - the rest are mostly to do with landing the capsule safely so the meatbags that'll go inside don't die. Meanwhile, China sent three astronauts to the brand spanking new Tiangong space station, relieving the existing crew, meaning there will be a total of 6 taikonauts enjoying the view of Earth while handover takes place. At a conference in Sydney, Lieutenant-General Nina Armagno, the US Space Force director of staff, said that "I think it's entirely possible they [China] could catch up and surpass us, absolutely" and that "the progress they've made is stunning".
Charlie Warzel makes a good argument in this article that social media as we know it - or more accurately, text/image based content made public - is dead. TikTok and YouTube are "far easier and more engaging to consume than cascading feeds of short-burst text" and that "video just encodes so much more information than text". He goes on to explain that "the medium is so dense, and, ultimately, that's more effective at communicating information. It's shocking how much less experience younger generations have with reading, and just how much better trained they are to use and interpret high-density mediums. I don't mean this as a negative — they are able to communicate so much better with these mediums". As someone that makes a living with words people read, this is disturbing, but I totally get it. Even my friends (who know who you are) swap and share TikTok videos, not blog posts or tweets.
On flight day 13, Orion reached its maximum distance from Earth during the Artemis I mission when it was 268,563 miles away from our home planet. Orion has now traveled farther than any other spacecraft built for humans. (NASA Johnson / Flickr)
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