Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Let’s try this again: SpaceX is looking to launch its 18th International Space Station (ISS) resupply mission on Thursday at 6:01 PM ET (3:01 PM PT), a day after it tried to do so a first time. The initial attempt was scrubbed at the last minute due to weather conditions on the launch range in Florida at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, but there’s a backup window today so Elon’s rocket company will try again. The stream above will begin about 15 minutes beforehand.

CRS-18 will send a Dragon cargo capsule with 5,000 lbs of experiment materials, supplies and other cargo including a new automated docking sleeve to the ISS. This mission is one of the last in SpaceX’s current ISS resupply contract, which covers 20 total engagements – but NASA and SpaceX essentially re-upped for a second batch through 2024 as part of a new contract signed in 2016.

The Dragon cargo craft used on this mission has actually flown two previous ISS resupply missions, and will be the first to manage a third should this trip go as planned. It’ll rendezvous with the ISS in a few days, be unloaded by astronauts and re-loaded with return cargo, before detaching from the ISS and returning to Earth to splash down in the Pacific Ocean for recovery. Dragon will launch aboard a Falcon 9 first-stage booster that was used just a couple of months ago for the most recent CRS mission, too.

Tulsi Now Inc., the campaign committee for Tulsi Gabbard, filed a lawsuit this week accusing Google of infringing her free speech. The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate took the online giant to task over the suspension of a campaign advertising account for a total of six hours following the first presidential debate.

“Google’s discriminatory actions against my campaign are reflective of how dangerous their complete dominance over internet search is, and how the increasing dominance of big tech companies over our public discourse threatens our core American values,” Rep. Gabbard said in a statement offered to The New York Times, which was the first to report the story. “This is a threat to free speech, fair elections, and to our democracy, and I intend to fight back on behalf of all Americans.”

According to Google, the congresswoman’s account was flagged for “unusual activity,” when “large spending changes” triggered an automatic fraud prevention system. The campaign was suspend for around six hours overnight between June 27 and 28 — a relatively short amount of time, but a key one, in the wake of two large debates housting the massive Democratic field.

Gabbard’s campaign chalks the bump in spending up to a large increase in searches following national appearance. “To this day, Google has not provided a straight answer — let alone a credible one — as to why Tulsi’s political speech was silenced when millions of people wanted to hear from her,” the campaign writes in the suit.

As a private company, Google is not capable of violating the free speech enabled by the first amendment. But Gabbard joins a growing number of politicians taking on tech companies over similar issues. Thus far, however, the complaints have largely come from Republican circles calling out sites like Twitter and Facebook for perceived liberal biases.

The campaign, meanwhile, has turned the move into a push for fundraising. “Please join Tulsi in her fight for our core American values of free speech and fair elections,” it writes. “The Big Tech companies need to be held accountable for their actions, and that’s why we need Tulsi in the White House!”

We have reached out to Rep. Gabbard’s campaign for further comment.

If you’re on Discord, you’re probably not a member of just one chat server. They tend to collect. You install it to chat with your Fortnite friends… then a few of them split off and start an Apex server. And each of your favorite streamers has a server, so maybe join those. Oh! And now you’re in a clan, so add their server too. Then you realize that every city around you has its own Pokémon GO Discord, so you might as well add those too.

Eventually you’re dealing with a list of like 40 servers, and just finding the one you’re looking for in that little lineup of circular icons becomes a chore.

With that in mind, Discord is getting a feature that users have been requesting for ages: server folders.

Want to group your Rocket League chats into one folder, and all of those GO servers into another? If you’re used to making folders on iOS or Android, it’s pretty similar: just drag one icon on top of another, and you’ve got a folder.

Folders can be color coded to help you find’em faster — and once this update rolls out, they’ll show up on both desktop and mobile.

Perhaps handiest of all: you can dismiss all notifications/badges for an entire folder at once. Makes clearing out all your unreads in the morning just a little bit easier.

Discord put together a little video showing off the new folder mechanism here:

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1. Toyota invests $600 million in Didi, with the two setting up a new joint venture for driver services

Toyota has made a big investment in Didi Chuxing . As part of the agreement, the two companies will form a joint venture with GAC Toyota Motor to provide vehicle-related services to Didi drivers.

This is the just the latest of Toyota’s investments in ride-hailing and vehicle-sharing companies — it also backed Uber and JapanTaxi.

2. Samsung readies Galaxy Fold for September release

No concrete date just yet, but this is still more specific than the “coming weeks” line we’ve been hearing for a few months now.

3. Robinhood stored passwords in plaintext, so change yours now

This security misstep could have seriously exposed Robinhood’s users, although the company says that it has no evidence the data was accessed improperly.

4. Sonos and Ikea’s Symfonisk wireless speakers are a symphony of sound and design

The $99 Symfonisk Wi-Fi bookshelf speaker and the $179 Symfonisk table lamp with Wi-Fi speaker both deliver the excellent performance and sound quality that’s expected from Sonos, in practical everyday designs created by Ikea.

5. Tinder’s new personal security feature can protect LGBTQ+ users in hostile nations

Users who identify on the app as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer will no longer automatically appear on Tinder when they arrive in an oppressive state.

6. DoorDash will change controversial tipping model

Under the old model, tips were essentially subsidizing payments that would otherwise have come from DoorDash. The company isn’t releasing all the details of its new model yet, but the key change is that driver earnings “will increase by the exact amount a customer tips on every order.”

7. Duo’s Wendy Nather to talk security at TC Sessions: Enterprise

Nather is one of the most respected and trusted voices in the cybersecurity community as a regular speaker on a range of topics, from threat intelligence to risk analysis, incident response, data security and privacy issues.

NBCUniversal is getting a little more specific about its streaming plans.

Variety reports that NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke was on this morning’s earnings call for parent company Comcast, announcing that the NBCUniversal streaming service will launch in April 2020.

The company had previously said the service would launch in “early 2020”, and would be ad-supported with a paid, ad-free option. As part of these plans, NBCUniversal has also reclaimed the streaming rights to “The Office,” which will be leaving Netflix in January 2021.

An NBC sitcom that ended six years ago might not seem like the sturdiest foundation on which to launch yet another streamer, but “The Office” is actually Netflix’s most-watched show, according to Nielsen.  And while NBCUniversal will be investing in streaming originals, Burke said, “I would expect the vast majority of consumption in the beginning would be [of] acquired programs.”

It looks like there’s going to be a big wave of media companies  launching their streaming plays in the next year or so — Disney+ is coming on November 12, and WarnerMedia’s HBO Max (which has the rights to another of Netflix’s most popular shows, “Friends”) is scheduled to launch in spring 2020. On top of all that, Apple’s TV+ is also supposed to arrive this fall.

AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing arm, today announced the beta launch of the AWS Chatbot, a chatty little chap who slides into your Slack and Amazon Chime channels and can inform you of any issues with your AWS resources.

It’s hard to imagine DevOps teams that don’t use Slack or similar tools, so it’s actually a bit of a surprise that AWS, which has long offered all of the tools to build chatbots, didn’t launch a similar service before.

The bot hooks into the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), which in turn allows you to integrate it with other AWS services. Right now, that list includes Amazon Cloudwatch, AWS Health, Budgets, Security Hub, GuardDuty and CloudFormation. That’s not exactly every AWS service, but it covers most of the bases for companies that want to keep an eye on their AWS deployments.

“DevOps teams widely use chat rooms as communications hubs where team members interact—both with one another and with the systems that they operate,” writes AWS’s product manager Ilya Bezdelev in today’s announcement. “Bots help facilitate these interactions, delivering important notifications and relaying commands from users back to systems. Many teams even prefer that operational events and notifications come through chat rooms where the entire team can see the notifications and discuss next steps.”

In good AWS fashion, it takes a bit of work to get everything set up for the AWS chatbot to work.

Right now, though, all of this seems to be a one-way street, too. You can get alerts to Slack, but at least in the beta, you can’t push any commands back to AWS yet. That means this chatbot likes to talk but isn’t much of a listener yet. Chances are, though, we’ll see more of that functionality once it hits general availability.

EQT Ventures, Initialized Capital, CRV and Y Combinator have fueled Standard Cognition with another $35 million to help retailers battle Amazon. The deal values the San Francisco-based autonomous checkout startup, founded in 2017, at $535 million.

Standard Cognition implants its AI-powered computer vision platform, which enables the autonomous checkout process, in brick-and-mortar stores. To date, the company has installed its hardware in five stores in the U.S. and Japan, with plans to expand globally using the new investment. Standard Cognition co-founder and chief operating officer Michael Suswal tells TechCrunch the company is counting on support from European VC firm EQT Ventures, which led the deal, to launch its technology in Europe.

Here’s a breakdown of the Standard Cognition autonomous checkout experience: A customer walks into one of Standard Cognition’s partners’ stores and one of 27 overhead cameras (more or less depending on the size of the store) will identify you by shape and movement, not facial recognition. The customer then opens the company’s iOS or Android app and a special light pattern flashes, allowing the cameras to tie you to your account and payment method. Finally, grab whatever items you need and leave the store. No checkout is required for Standard Cognition to bill you. It even works without an app: Shop like normal and then walk up to a kiosk screen, the cameras identify what items you have chosen and you can pay with cash or credit card.

News of Standard Cognition’s Series B comes shortly after Amazon confirmed plans to open three additional Amazon Go stores, the e-commerce giant’s cashierless convenience stores. Amazon opened its first Amazon Go store in Seattle in 2016, though Standard Cognition, which operates only one branded brick-and-mortar store of its own, was first to plant roots in San Francisco. Standard Cognition, however, has no plans to open any more of its own stores because “running stores takes a lot of effort,” said Suswal. Instead, the company plans to bring its cashierless experience to other retail chains with the fresh funds.

Standard Cognition announces its Series B financing just eight months after closing a $40 million Series A. Suswal, justifying the lightning-fast growth, said 2019 has been Standard’s “year of deployment,” next year will be “the year of repeatability” and 2021 will be “the year of scale.” The company has raised a total of $86 million in venture capital funding.

“Traditional brick and mortar retailers are caught in a perfect storm,” EQT partner Alastair Mitchell said in a statement. “From the encroachment of behemoths like Amazon into every inch of the market to changing consumer attitudes, as busy people demand an ever more efficient shopping experience, margins are being squeezed like never before. The talented and driven Standard Cognition team have worked quickly to build a product that allows physical retailers, of all sizes, to tackle these challenges.”

Over the past several years, many have suggested that broadband internet should be regarded as public utility, like water or gas. Staying connected has become an essential part of nearly every facet of of life, but according to a new report, high speed connections may not be as prevalent here in the States as you may think.

In its new Rural America and Technology study, NPD notes that 31 percent of U.S. households don’t have broadband (25Mbps downloads and up) internet connections. The number works out to roughly 100 million per the report. That figure, unsurprisingly, is highly concentrated in rural areas — less than one-fifth of that population has a broadband connection.

While broadband was considered something of a luxury in the not so distant past, it’s grown in an increasingly essential aspect of modern existence, from work to health to entertainment. The concentration of access to the technology in urban vs. rural areas has been a major aspect in what analysts have referred to as the “digital divide.” Rural areas make up nearly 97 percent of the total U.S. land.

On the upside, the report suggests that 5G could have a profound impact on those numbers. “The roll out of 5G will have a significant impact in rural America, disrupting the limited broadband carrier market and delivering broadband to many households that have not previously had access,” NPD’s Eddie Hold said in a statement released with the report. “This will inevitably provide an opportunity for manufacturers and retailers to reach new consumers with advanced devices.”

Given the speed and spottiness with which the technology has been rolled out thus far, however, coupled with the high prices of first-generation handsets, however, it will likely take several years before that comes to pass.

Serverless developers have always faced a steep challenge when it comes to writing code on their laptops, and debugging said code on cloud services. It’s sort of a chicken and egg thing. You can’t deploy until you’re ready, but you can’t know if you’re ready without testing. That requires access to your cloud services on your laptop, something that up until now has been difficult to replicate. Today, Stackery announced a free tool that lets developers test cloud services on their laptops before they deploy.

Abner Germanow, chief marketing officer at Stackery, says the new tool solves a really hard problem for developers. “Local development is difficult because you’re not building on a server. You’re building a set of services that live in the cloud, and you can’t replicate AWS inside your laptop,” he said.

Instead, Stackery has created a clever work-around called Cloudlocal. Today, it is designed to work with AWS Lambda in the Amazon cloud. Stackery CTO and co-founder Chase Douglas says the company has essentially found a way to replicate the cloud on the developer’s local laptop. “We help you take your laptop to the cloud. What I mean by that is that we take some base best practices and tools that AWS provides, which makes it possible to run the runtime of your function on your laptop,” Douglas explained.

He adds, “Then we add on to that the same permissions credentials that your function would use as though it were running in Lambda. Then we go and fetch more about the environment of that Lambda, like environment variable values, which is key for things like service discovery and parameterization.”

He said that before having a tool like Cloudlocal, developers would have to create ways to mimic services on the laptop, which creates a lot of never-ending extra work, and might not match the way the services behave exactly. The company actually came up with the solution by solving a problem it had developing serverless programs locally in-house, and decided to share it with the community.

Stackery was founded in 2016 and has raised over $7 million, according to Crunchbase data. It offers tools free for individual developers, but makes money charging for larger teams for it services.

Netflix has canceled the animated series “Tuca and Bertie” after a single season.

The show, which starred Tiffany Haddish and Ali Wong as the titular friends (a toucan named Tuca and a songbird named Bertie), debuted in May. It shared some creative DNA with Netflix’s “BoJack Horseman — creator Lisa Hanawalt designed the characters on “BoJack” — but it was a different show, with a diverse cast and crazier, dirtier storylines.

Hanawalt announced the cancellation on Twitter, saying that Netflix would not be ordering a second season of the show, but adding, “I’m hopeful we can find a home for Tuca & Bertie to continue their adventures.”

The news came on the same day that Netflix announced its cancellation of “Designated Survivor,” the Kiefer Sutherland-starring series that was previously canceled by ABC before moving to Netflix.

It also comes shortly after Netflix reported disappointing subscriber growth for its second quarter, and a net loss of subscribers in the United States — something that the streaming service specifically attributed to the failure of its latest content to attract as many additional subscribers as hoped.