NASA’s InSight lander says goodbye from Mars

This is likely the final photo that NASA’s Mars InSight lander will ever send back to Earth. The robot has been snapping pics and gathering data about the Martian environment since landing on the planet in November 2018 — and it’s been steadily accumulating dust on its solar panels that entire time. As NASA predicted earlier this year, the layer of debris has finally become too thick for the solar panels to operate. The InSight Twitter account officially said goodbye on December 19th with a final image from the surface of Mars.

“My power’s really low, so this may be the last image I can send,” the tweet reads. “Don’t worry about me though: my time here has been both productive and serene. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will – but I’ll be signing off here soon. Thanks for staying with me.”

You’re welcome, metal astronaut.

InSight touched down on Mars on November 26th, 2018. It set up a seismometer on the Martian surface and collected data about marsquakes, which helped NASA scientists compile a clearer picture of the planet’s interior structure. Over the past four years, InSight provided data on more than 500 quakes and at least one meteoroid impact. From these reports, NASA researchers concluded Mars’ core is about half the size of Earth’s and likely composed of lighter elements than previously thought.

NASA announced in May 2022 that InSight would likely go dark by the end of the summer, due to the dust settling on the lander’s solar panels. InSight had recently celebrated its fourth anniversary on Mars when it stopped communicating with NASA. In a blog update on December 19th, the agency said the following:

“On Dec. 18, 2022, NASA’s InSight did not respond to communications from Earth. The lander’s power has been declining for months, as expected, and it’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations. It’s unknown what prompted the change in its energy; the last time the mission contacted the spacecraft was on Dec. 15, 2022. The mission will continue to try and contact InSight.”

An algorithm can use WiFi signal changes to help identify breathing issues

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers have developed a way to monitor breathing based on tiny changes in WiFi signals. They say their BreatheSmart deep-learning algorithm could help detect if someone in the household is having breathing issues.

WiFi signals are almost ubiquitous. They bounce off of and pass through surfaces as they try to link devices with routers. But any movement will alter the signal’s path, including how the body moves as we breathe, which can change if we have any issues. For instance, your chest will move differently if you’re coughing.

Other researchers have explored the use of WiFi signals to detect people and movements, but their approaches required dedicated sensing devices and their studies provided limited data. A few years ago, a company called Origin Wireless developed an algorithm that works with a WiFi mesh network. Similarly, NIST says BreatheSmart works with routers and devices that are already available on the market. It only requires a single router and connected device.

The scientists changed the firmware on a router so that it would check “channel state information,” or CSI, more frequently. CSI refers to the signals that are sent from a device, such as a phone or laptop, to the router. CSI signals are consistent and the router understands what they should look like, but deviations in the environment, such as the signal being affected by surfaces or movement, modify the signals. The researchers got the router to request these CSI signals up to 10 times per second to gain a better sense of how the signal was being modified.

The team simulated several breathing conditions with a manikin and monitored changes in CSI signals with an off-the-shelf router and receiving device. To make sense of the data they collected, NIST research associate Susanna Mosleh developed the algorithm. In a paper, the researchers noted that BreatheSmart correctly identified the simulated breathing conditions 99.54 percent of the time.

Mosleh and Jason Coder, who heads up NIST’s research in shared spectrum metrology, hope developers will be able to use their research to create software that can remotely monitor a person’s breathing with existing hardware. “All the ways we’re gathering the data is done on software on the access point (in this case, the router), which could be done by an app on a phone,” Coder said. “This work tries to lay out how somebody can develop and test their own algorithm. This is a framework to help them get relevant information.”

SEC deposition shows Zuckerberg misled Congress about Cambridge Analytica timeline

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg misled Congress and the American public about how early he knew about the threat Cambridge Analytica posed to Facebook user privacy, according to a newly published US Securities and Exchange Commission document. The sworn deposition was obtained by Zamaan Qureshi, a policy advisor with the Real Facebook Oversight Board. 

On February 19th, 2019, Zuckerberg told the SEC he was aware of Cambridge Analytica at least as early as 2017. At the start of that year, Zuckerberg sent an email to Facebook staff asking about an article Motherboard published about the data firm. The Vice News outlet was one of the first English-language publications to detail Cambridge Analytica’s use of online data to build psychographic profiles. 

The SEC asked Zuckerberg if that was the first time he had become aware of the firm. “I think that’s probably right,” he told the Commission. “My guess is I heard of them before. And that this was after seeing a couple of mentions of what they were claiming to do, I wanted to ask people who I trusted what their assessment was.”  

Zuckerberg also considered explicitly calling out Cambridge Analytica in a statement he made about Facebook’s attempts to combat Russian election meddling in the fall of 2017. His first draft called for him to state: “We are already looking into foreign actors including Russian intelligence actors in other Soviet states and organizations like Cambridge Analytica.” However, on the day of the livestream, he at best alluded to the firm, saying Facebook was investigating “organizations like the campaigns, to further our understanding of how they used our tools.”

The timeline Zuckerberg provided to the SEC contradicts the one he gave during sworn testimony before the House Financial Services Committee on October 23rd, 2019. “I’m not sure of the exact time, but it was probably around the time it became public, I think it was around March of 2018. I could be wrong, though,” he told Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  

When asked to comment on Real Facebook Oversight Board’s findings, Meta pointed Engadget to its 2019 Federal Trade Commission settlement, which saw the company agree to pay $5 billion in financial penalties and implement new privacy measures. “This has been a settled case for over three years,” a Meta spokesperson added. The office of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not immediately respond to Engadget’s comment request.

The findings are likely to prompt new questions about Facebook’s handling of Cambridge Analytica. To this day, the scandal is the largest in Meta’s history. The data firm harvested information from as many as 87 million Facebook profiles and may have passed on that data to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Brexit campaign.

USPS expects to only buy electric delivery vehicles starting in 2026

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‘Sifu’ is getting an arena mode and heading to Xbox in March 2023

Sifu’s long-awaited Arenas mode will arrive next March. Developer Sloclap made the announcement through IGN, which shared a trailer for the upcoming DLC. The studio first teased the mode last April when it published a free content roadmap for Sifu. At the time, Sloclap said the update would arrive in the winter of 2022. However, true to its initial promise, the mode will include new outfits for players to unlock.

“Successfully completing the arenas will progressively unlock a massive new modifiers batch, which doubles the current game’s amount and notably brings alternative moves to the Kung Fu palette of our main character,” Sloclap told IGN. “Completing the new Arenas challenges will also unlock new cheats and exclusive new outfits.” If you haven’t had a chance to play Sifu yet because it’s not available on Xbox, there’s more good news. The arrival of the Arenas mode update will coincide with the game’s release on Xbox and Steam. Sloclap promised to share more information about both news items soon.

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Amazon and EU finalize third-party seller antitrust deal

Amazon has agreed to change some business practices in the European Union as part of legally binding commitments with the bloc’s executive branch. The European Commission said the deal will put antitrust investigations over how Amazon treats third-party sellers to bed for the time being. Amazon will need to abide by the commitments for between five and seven years or it could face hefty fines.

“Today’s decision sets new rules for how Amazon operates its business in Europe. Amazon can no longer abuse its dual role [as both marketplace and seller] and will have to change several business practices,” Margrethe Vestager, the Commission’s executive vice-president in charge of competition policy, said in a statement. “They cover the use of data, the selection of sellers in the Buy Box and the conditions of access to the Amazon Prime Program. Competing independent retailers and carriers as well as consumers will benefit from these changes opening up new opportunities and choice.”

The deal includes several preliminary commitments Amazon made in July. Among other things, it will rank all sellers equally in the Buy Box, which displays an item from a specific seller so customers can quickly purchase it. Amazon said it will display a second Buy Box if another seller offers the product with a significantly different price and/or delivery time.

Third-party sellers in the EU will be able to offer their products through Prime without having to use Amazon’s delivery or logistics services. Additionally, Amazon will not use any non-public data relating to third-party sellers to benefit its own business, including logistics or creating copycat versions of popular products.

The final deal includes some additional commitments, such as making it easier for third-party sellers to directly contact their Amazon customers so they can provide similar delivery services to those offered by Amazon. The company will also need to create a way for sellers and carriers to file complaints if they suspect it isn’t complying with the commitments.

Amazon said it disagreed with some of the Commission’s preliminary conclusions. However, it told the Associated Press that, “We are pleased that we have addressed the European Commission’s concerns and resolved these matters.”

The settlement applies for five years in most cases. The Prime and second Buy Box commitments will last for seven years. The deal is legally enforceable in the European Economic Area save for Italy. That country’s competition authority has imposed its own penalties on Amazon.

If EU regulators determine that Amazon isn’t sticking to the terms of the deal, the Commission can fine the company up to 10 percent of its global annual revenue without having to find an infringement of antitrust rules. Based on Amazon’s 2021 revenue, that fine could be as much as $47 billion. Alternatively, the EC could fine Amazon five percent of its daily turnover for every day that it doesn’t comply with the terms of the deal.

EU regulators brought formal antitrust charges against Amazon in November 2020, accusing the company of abusing its dual position. The Commission opened an investigation over the use of non-public data the previous year. In a separate investigation, the EC found that Amazon “abused its dominance on the French, German and Spanish markets for the provision of online marketplace services to third-party sellers.” Amazon is still facing scrutiny on these issues in the US and the UK.

Hands-on with LG’s 240Hz UltraGear gaming monitors: Setting a new bar for OLED refresh rates

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