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The Launch of Boeing's Starliner Spacecraft Didn't go to Plan

Charlotte Henry ·

Boeing’s Starliner passenger spacecraft launched smoothly on Friday. However, as The Verge reported, things went wrong after that. It is now unable to dock with the International Space Station.

NASA and Boeing are working together to figure out what to do next with the spacecraft. Since the Starliner cannot reach the ISS, Boeing is going to try to bring it safely home, demonstrating how it will land on future missions. It’s possible that Starliner will return to Earth and land at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in the next 48 hours. However, that’s not official yet, and Boeing says it will provide updates on what the team decides. Today’s botched launch is a big blow for both NASA and Boeing, which have been working for years to get to this flight. Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner is a critical part of NASA’s Commercial Crew program, an initiative to develop private US vehicles to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. During today’s test flight, Boeing planned to demonstrate Starliner’s ability to travel to space and dock with the station.

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Twitter Removed 5,929 Accounts Linked to 'State-Backed Information Operations'

Charlotte Henry ·

Twitter announced the removal of 5,929 accounts on Friday. It said the accounts were involved with a “state-backed information campaign” that originated in Saudi Arabia. They were part of a network that consisted of over 88,000 accounts, the firm said in a blog post.

Today, we are sharing comprehensive data about 5,929 accounts which we have removed for violating our platform manipulation policies. Rigorous investigations by our Site Integrity team have allowed us to attribute these accounts to a significant state-backed information operation on Twitter originating in Saudi Arabia. These accounts represent the core portion of a larger network of more than 88,000 accounts engaged in spammy behaviour across a wide range of topics. We have permanently suspended all of these accounts from the service. In order to protect the privacy of potentially compromised accounts repurposed to engage in platform manipulation, and in response to researcher feedback requesting that we pre-filter unrelated spam, we have not disclosed data for all 88,000 accounts. In the interest of offering meaningful transparency, the dataset we are disclosing includes a representative, random sample of the fake and spammy accounts associated with this broader network.

 

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The Day Steve Jobs Returned to Apple

Charlotte Henry ·

In many ways, Apple without Steve Jobs is unthinkable. Yet, of course, for a period of time, it happened. CultofMac reflected on the day he returned home.

The Apple co-founder didn’t just come as part of the NeXT package. He was a major part of the deal. “I’m not just buying software, I’m buying Steve,” Apple CEO Gil Amelio said at the time. As part of the deal, Jobs got 1.5 million shares of Apple stock. Jobs wasn’t initially intended to be Apple’s new CEO. Bizarrely, Amelio apparently thought Jobs could be contained as a creative force. Amelio figured he could continue running the company, and simply wheel out Jobs whenever Apple needed him.

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267 Million Facebook IDs, Phone Numbers Exposed

Andrew Orr ·

A database that contained over 267 million Facebook user IDs, phone numbers, and IDs was discovered on the web. It wasn’t password-protected.

Comparitech partnered with security researcher Bob Diachenko to uncover the Elasticsearch cluster. Diachenko believes the trove of data is most likely the result of an illegal scraping operation or Facebook API abuse by criminals in Vietnam, according to the evidence.

Diachenko immediately notified the internet service provider managing the IP address of the server so that access could be removed. However, Diachenko says the data was also posted to a hacker forum as a download.