Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), has died at age 78 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. He was found deceased at his home on Friday after friends requested a wellness check. Christensen, along with Randy Suess, created the first BBS in Chicago in 1978, leading to an important cultural era of digital community-building that presaged much of our online world today.
In the 1980s and 1990s, BBSes introduced many home computer users to multiplayer online gaming, message boards, and online community building in an era before the Internet became widely available to people outside of science and academia. It also gave rise to the shareware gaming scene that led to companies like Epic Games today.
Friends and associates remember Christensen as humble and unassuming, a quiet innovator who never sought the spotlight for his groundbreaking work. Despite creating one of the foundational technologies of the digital age, Christensen maintained a low profile throughout his life, content with his long-standing career at IBM and showing no bitterness or sense of missed opportunity as the Internet age dawned.
After more than nine months in an unusual, highly elliptical orbit, the US military's X-37B spaceplane will soon begin dipping its wings into Earth's atmosphere to lower its altitude before eventually coming back to Earth for a runway landing, the Space Force said Thursday.
The aerobraking maneuvers will use a series of passes through the uppermost fringes of the atmosphere to gradually reduce its speed with aerodynamic drag while expending minimal fuel. In orbital mechanics, this reduction in velocity will bring the apogee, or high point, of the X-37B's orbit closer to Earth.
Bleeding energy
The Space Force called the aerobraking a "novel space maneuver" and said its purpose was to allow the X-37B to "safely dispose of its service module components in accordance with recognized standards for space debris mitigation."
Tesla isn’t aware of any collisions, injuries, or fatalities attributed to the defective pedals. | Image: Parker Ortolani / The Verge
Tesla has issued a recall for effectively every Cybertruck it’s delivered to customers due to a fault that’s causing the vehicle’s accelerator pedal to get stuck.
The fault was caused by an “unapproved change” that introduced “lubricant (soap)” during the assembly of the accelerator pedals, which reduced the retention of the pad, the recall notice states. The truck’s brakes will still function if the accelerator pedal becomes trapped, though this obviously isn’t an ideal workaround.
The recall impacts “all Model Year (‘MY’) 2024 Cybertruck vehicles manufactured from November 13, 2023, to April 4, 2024,” with the fault estimated to be present in 100 percent of the total 3,878 vehicles. This is essentially every Cybertruck delivered to customers since its launch event last year.
A recall seemed to be inevitable after Cybertruck customers were reportedly notified earlier this week that their deliveries were being delayed, with at least one owner being informed by their vehicle dealership that the truck was being recalled over its accelerator pedal. The issue was also highlighted by another Cybertruck owner on TikTok, showing how the fault “held the accelerator down 100 percent, full throttle.”
The timeline reported in the NHTSA filing says that Tesla was first notified of the defective accelerator pedals on March 31st, followed by a second report on April 3rd. The company completed internal assessments to find the cause on April 12th before voluntarily issuing a recall. As of Monday this week, Tesla said it isn’t aware of any “collisions, injuries, or deaths” attributed to the pedal fault.
Tesla is notifying its stores and service centers of the issue “on or around” April 19th and has committed to replacing or reworking the pedals on recalled vehicles at no charge to Cybertruck owners. Any trucks produced from April 17th onward will also be equipped with a new accelerator pedal component and part number.
This is actually the second ofTesla’smanyrecalls to affect the Cybertruck, but it is the most significant. The company issued a recall for 2 million Tesla vehicles in the US back in February due to the font on the warning lights panel being too small to comply with safety standards, though this was resolved with a software update.
Tesla fans have taken issue with the word “recall” in the past when the company has proven adept at fixing its problems through over-the-air software updates. But they likely will have to admit that, in this case, the terminology applies.
Keaton Peters reports via the Texas Tribune: Students sitting for their STAAR exams this week will be part of a new method of evaluating Texas schools: Their written answers on the state's standardized tests will be graded automatically by computers. The Texas Education Agency is rolling out an "automated scoring engine" for open-ended questions on the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness for reading, writing, science and social studies. The technology, which uses natural language processing technology like artificial intelligence chatbots such as GPT-4, will save the state agency about $15-20 million per year that it would otherwise have spent on hiring human scorers through a third-party contractor.
The change comes after the STAAR test, which measures students' understanding of state-mandated core curriculum, was redesigned in 2023. The test now includes fewer multiple choice questions and more open-ended questions -- known as constructed response items. After the redesign, there are six to seven times more constructed response items. "We wanted to keep as many constructed open ended responses as we can, but they take an incredible amount of time to score," said Jose Rios, director of student assessment at the Texas Education Agency. In 2023, Rios said TEA hired about 6,000 temporary scorers, but this year, it will need under 2,000.
To develop the scoring system, the TEA gathered 3,000 responses that went through two rounds of human scoring. From this field sample, the automated scoring engine learns the characteristics of responses, and it is programmed to assign the same scores a human would have given. This spring, as students complete their tests, the computer will first grade all the constructed responses. Then, a quarter of the responses will be rescored by humans. When the computer has "low confidence" in the score it assigned, those responses will be automatically reassigned to a human. The same thing will happen when the computer encounters a type of response that its programming does not recognize, such as one using lots of slang or words in a language other than English. "In addition to 'low confidence' scores and responses that do not fit in the computer's programming, a random sample of responses will also be automatically handed off to humans to check the computer's work," notes Peters. While similar to ChatGPT, TEA officials have resisted the suggestion that the scoring engine is artificial intelligence. They note that the process doesn't "learn" from the responses and always defers to its original programming set up by the state.
Six different ground cinnamon products sold at retailers including Save A Lot, Dollar Tree, and Family Dollar contain elevated levels of lead and should be recalled and thrown away immediately, the US Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday.
The brands are La Fiesta, Marcum, MK, Swad, Supreme Tradition, and El Chilar, and the products are sold in plastic spice bottles or in bags at various retailers. The FDA has contacted the manufacturers to urge them to issue voluntary recalls, though it has not been able to reach one of the firms, MTCI, which distributes the MK-branded cinnamon.
The announcement comes amid a nationwide outbreak of lead poisoning in young children linked to cinnamon applesauce pouches contaminated with lead and chromium. In that case, it's believed that a spice grinder in Ecuador intentionally added extreme levels of lead chromate to cinnamon imported from Sri Lanka, likely to improve its weight and/or appearance. Food manufacturer Austrofoods then added the heavily contaminated cinnamon, without any testing, to cinnamon applesauce pouches marketed to toddlers and young children across the US. In the latest update, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified 468 cases of lead poisoning that have been linked to the cinnamon applesauce pouches. The cases span 44 states and are mostly in very young children.
iPhone 15 users should now see more battery-related information under Battery Health settings. | Image: The Verge
Apple’s iOS 17.4 update is now available, introducing new emoji and a cryptographic security protocol for iMessage, alongside some major changes to the App Store and contactless payments for the iPhone platform in Europe. Apple is making several of these changes to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a law that aims to make the digital economy fairer by removing unfair advantages that tech giants hold over businesses and end users.
iOS 17.4 will allow third-party developers to offer alternative app marketplaces and app downloads to EU users from outside the iOS App Store. Developers wanting to take advantage of this will be required to go through Apple’s approval process and pay Apple a “Core Technology Fee” that charges 50 euro cents per install once an app reaches 1 million downloads annually.
iPhone owners in the EU will see different update notes that specifically mention new options available for app stores, web browsers, and payment options.
The approval process may take some time, but we know that at least one enterprise-focused app marketplace from Mobivention will be available on March 7th. Epic is also working on releasing the Epic Game Store on iOS in 2024, and software company MacPaw is planning to officially launch its Setapp store in April.
Fortnite is coming back to iOS in Europe this year!
Via our soon to launch @EpicGames Store for iOS thanks to new rules in Europe via the new Digital Markets Act (DMA), stay tuned for more details. https://t.co/7nOa2lcdhN
iOS 17.4 allows people in the EU to download alternative browser engines that aren’t based on Apple’s WebKit, such as Chrome and Firefox, with a new choice screen in iOS Safari that will prompt users to select a default browser when opened for the first time. While no browser alternatives have been officially announced, both Google and Mozilla are currently experimenting with new iOS browsers that could eventually be released to the public.
Apple is also introducing new APIs that allow third-party developers to utilize the iPhone’s NFC payment chip for contactless payment services besides Apple Pay and Apple Wallet in the European Economic Area. No alternative contactless providers have been confirmed yet, but users will find a list of apps that have requested the feature under Settings > Privacy & Security > Contactless & NFC.
While Apple previously revealed it was planning to drop support for progressive web apps (PWAs) in the EU to avoid building “an entirely new integration architecture” around DMA compliance, the company now says it will “continue to offer the existing Home Screen web apps capability” for EU users. However, these homescreen apps will still run using WebKit technology, with no option to be powered by third-party browser engines.
Outside of its DMA obligations, Apple’s iOS 17.4 update adds some new, widely available features that can be enjoyed globally. The Podcasts app is adding auto-generated audio transcripts for English, French, German, and Spanish-language podcasts, which can be searched for specific phrases or words to go directly to the corresponding point in the episode. A new cryptographic protocol for iMessage, known as PQ3, is also included in the iOS 17.4 update, supposedly bolstering end-to-end messaging encryption against potential quantum computing attacks. No such attacks have been disclosed, but Apple is laying the groundwork to prepare for such an eventuality.
Siri has a new option to read incoming messages in any Siri-supported language, which includes Spanish, French, German, Chinese, and more. Over 100 new emoji — such as a lime, broken chain, brown mushroom, and nodding / shaking heads — are also being added following the Unicode 15.1 update last September.
iPhone 15 devices will now display more battery-related information under the Battery Health settings, including cycle count, manufacture date, and when the battery was first used. And finally, the music recognition feature introduced in iOS 14.2 will now let users add identified songs to their Apple Music library and playlists.
iOS 17.4 is compatible with the same range of iPhone models as iOS 17, going back to the iPhone X range and second-generation iPhone SE. The rollout may be gradual, but you can check if it’s available on your device by heading into Settings > General > Software Update.
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