Company That 3D-Prints Houses on Earth Lands Lunar Construction Contract

In a conceptual rendering, astronauts watch robots 3D-print structures out of processed lunar dirt. (Credit: Icon Technology)

The raw material for the first such structure is already on the Moon: the surface layer of soil, or regolith (PDF(Opens in a new window)) to geologists. NASA’s plans for long-term exploration of the Moon and, eventually, Mars rely heavily on generating needed materials and supplies from what’s on the ground there—what it calls “In situ resource utilization(Opens in a new window)”—instead of shipping everything from Earth.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/company-that-3d-prints-houses-on-earth-lands-lunar-construction-contract

Meta hit with ~$275M GDPR penalty for Facebook data-scraping breach

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

The penalty relates to an inquiry which was opened by the DPC on April 14, 2021, following media reports of more than 530M Facebook users’ personal data — including email addresses and mobile phone numbers — being exposed online.

At the time, Facebook tried to play down the breach — claiming the data that had been found floating around online was “old data” and that it had fixed the issue that led to the personal data being exposed.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/facebook-gdpr-penalty/

Tumblr to add support for ActivityPub, the social protocol powering Mastodon and other apps

Image Credits: MARTIN BUREAU/AFP / Getty Images

Tumblr will add support for ActivityPub, the open, decentralized social networking protocol that today is powering social networking software like Twitter alternative Mastodon, the Instagram-like Pixelfed, video streaming service PeerTube, and others. The news was revealed in response to a Twitter user’s complaint about Mastodon’s complexities. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg — whose company acquired Tumblr from Verizon in 2019 — suggested the user “come to Tumblr” as the site would soon “add activitypub for interconnect.”

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tumblr-to-add-support-for-activitypub-the-social-protocol-powering-mastodon-and-other-apps/

Meta Quest Pro review: get me out of here

Meta Quest Pro

The problem is, the Quest Pro isn’t very good. It’s a device seemingly launched without plan or purpose, highlighting VR’s persistent drawbacks without making good use of its strengths — and topped off with some irredeemably bad software. We might be seeing a roadmap for where Meta is going, but right now, it’s not a particularly fun place to be. And if Meta lingers there much longer, its metaverse is in trouble.

https://www.theverge.com/23451629/meta-quest-pro-vr-headset-horizon-review

RIP Leap Second: Time Fix to Be Scrapped by 2035

(Credit: Getty Images/Olena Ruban)

Though unnoticed by most people, the occasional one-second adjustment can cause problems for systems that require an exact, uninterrupted flow of time.

Reddit, for instance, was down for 40 minutes in 2012 when a leap second confused the company’s servers; four years later, Cloudflare’s DNS services were interrupted due to the miniscule time change.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/rip-leap-second-time-fix-to-be-scrapped-by-2035

Twitter locks staff out of offices until next week

REUTERS

One former Twitter employee, who wished to remain anonymous, told the BBC: “I think when the dust clears today, there’s probably going to be less than 2,000 people left.”

“The manager of that team, his manager was terminated. And then that manager’s manager was terminated. The person above that was one of the execs terminated on the first day. So there’s nobody left in that chain of command.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63672307

Google to pay record $391m privacy settlement

Google will pay $391.5m (£330m) to settle allegations about how it collects data from users.

“Consumers thought they had turned off their location-tracking features on Google – but the company continued to secretly record their movements and use that information for advertisers.”

The attorneys general said Google had been misleading consumers about location tracking since at least 2014, breaking state consumer-protection laws.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63635380