WhatsApp and Signal, along with Element, Session, Threema, Viber and Wire have signed an open letter addressed to the UK government, urging them to rethink the Online Safety Bill. If you've not been paying attention to my rants, this bill wants to legislate that all messaging apps must proactively scan all conversations "to protect children". That's obviously a problem for end-to-end encrypted apps like WhatsApp & Signal, as there's no way to do this without removing the security end-to-end encryption provides. It's a worry as if the UK does this (it looks likely they will unfortunately), then Australia will quickly be next. I think the USA will hold out longer, but the way some states are going it could be an issue their federal government has to deal with.
Elon Musk has started yet another company. This one is called TruthGPT and it was announced on Fox's Tucker Carlson Tonight - a true meeting of the brain geniuses. TruthGPT will be a "maximum truth-seeking AI" because OpenAI's GPT is too "woke" and "politically correct". He also reckons an AI that "cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe". The funny thing is, Musk was an initial investor and co-chair of OpenAI, but they've had multiple issues in the last few years. I guess he's cranky that OpenAI is such a success but he's getting zero credit for it like the little pissbaby he is.
Australia's National Electric Vehicle Strategy has finally been released. In it are three objectives - increase the supply of EVs, build the systems and infrastructure to support them, and encourage an increase in EV demand. It's mostly a reshash of existing initiatives, but there is some new stuff floated, like a Fuel Efficiency Standard (huge and much needed - it's only us an Russia without one), a national mapping tool that makes it easier to plan where to install EV charging infrastructure and a national recycling and reuse program for EV and other "large format" batteries. This all should have been done at least 5 years ago, but hey, better late than never. Full strategy PDF available here.
Todd Salat was out in the Alaskan wilderness taking some beautiful photos of the aurora lights when a "real bright light" started to form in the sky. As it got closer, it turned into a huge blue spiral, just sitting there in space. 3 hours earlier a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched 51 satellites and the stunning spiral is the Falcon 9's second stage venting its unused fuel before it burns up in the atmosphere. The "frozen water vapor in the fuel emissions gets illuminated a bluish-white color by high-altitude sunlight" is known as a "SpaceX Spiral" in the meteorological community, as it happens quite regularly thanks to the high number of launches SpaceX does these days.
NASA's Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) spacesuit undergoes antenna testing in NASA Johnson Space Center's anechoic chamber to inspect multi-layer insulation keep-out zones for the Wi-Fi and ultra-high-frequency antennas that are part of the spacesuit's communication system. The xEMU test article is named xGUS, the successor to the Extravehicular Mobility Unit test article (also named GUS), which was named after NASA astronaut Gus Grissom and his iconic silver spacesuit. This image was taken from where the "horn," or source antenna, is located that sends out radio frequency signals to the spacesuit. The anechoic chamber walls are covered with a material that absorbs electromagnetic energy allowing the anechoic chamber to simulate a space environment. The antenna test facility is utilized to test antenna radiation distribution pattern performance for spaceflight applications in electromagnetic environments. Pictured in the photo is antenna test engineer Will Bond. (NASA Johnson / Flickr)
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