Starliner n’en finit visiblement pas d’avoir des fuites. L’une d’entre elles était déjà repérée avant le décollage, deux autres sont arrivées pendant le vol, une quatrième juste après l’amarrage à la Station spatiale internationale et enfin une cinquième vient d’être annoncée. Le porte-parole de la NASA, Josh Finch, explique que cette cinquième fuite avait été détectée au moment du briefing post-amarrage, comme le rapporte SpaceNews.

• Starliner a (enfin) décollé, mais déjà trois fuites détectées sur la capsule
• Starliner s’est bien arrimée à l’ISS… malgré de nouveaux problèmes

« Les ingénieurs ont évalué les réserves en hélium en fonction des taux de fuite actuels et ont déterminé que Starliner avait suffisamment de marge pour supporter le voyage de retour depuis la station » vers la Terre, explique la NASA.

Le voyage ne demande que 7h alors que la capsule dispose de 70h d’autonomie avec les fuites actuelles. Tout le temps où Starliner est accroché à la Station spatiale internationale, les collecteurs sont fermés et il n’y a donc pas de fuite d’hélium.

« Les ingénieurs évaluent également une vanne d’isolement d’oxydant RCS [Reaction Control System ou système de pilotage par jets de gaz, ndlr] dans le module de service qui n’est pas correctement fermée », ajoute l’Agence spatiale américaine.

Le retour de la mission est programmé au plus tôt le mardi 18 juin, « en fonction de la météo et de l’état de préparation du vaisseau spatial ». En. attendant, « Starliner est autorisé à effectuer des scénarios de retour d’urgence de l’équipage de la station spatiale, si nécessaire, conformément aux règles de vol ».

Comme un Mammouth sans aile

D’après des chercheurs de l’université de Pennsylvanie, la migration de Twitter vers Mastodon tant attendue par les thuriféraires du pachyderme n’a pas vraiment eu lieu dans le milieu de la recherche scientifique. Au contraire, les deux tiers des chercheurs étudiés ayant eu la curiosité d’y mettre les pieds ont vite abandonné le réseau décentralisé.

Il y a un peu plus d’un an, certains chercheurs excédés par le rachat de Twitter par Elon Musk, par ses positions politiques et ses décisions erratiques sur le fonctionnement de son nouveau réseau social espéraient pousser leurs collègues vers le réseau social décentralisé Mastodon (basé sur le Fediverse).

« L’échec de la migration du Twitter académique »

Certains y ont pointé leur nez dès ce rachat, mais ont-ils persévéré en troquant les « tweets » du désormais X d’Elon Musk contre les « pouets » de Mastodon ? « Dans quelle mesure les universitaires ont-ils participé à la migration de Twitter vers Mastodon, et comment peut-on évaluer le succès ou l’échec de cette migration ? » se sont demandé Xinyu Wang, Sai Koneru et Sarah Rajtmajer, chercheurs à l’Université de Pennsylvanie dans un article mis en ligne sur la plateforme de prépublications scientifiques arXiv sous le titre explicite : « L’échec de la migration du Twitter académique ».

• Mastodon refuge pour communiquer librement sur la recherche ?

Cet article n’étudie pas la qualité des échanges entre chercheurs ainsi qu’avec le grand public sur les deux réseaux. Mais dans leurs conclusions, ils expliquent qu’ « alors que la plateforme décentralisée offrait une alternative prometteuse, les communautés établies et l’engagement clair du public sur Twitter se sont avérés trop importants pour être surmontés ».

Deux tiers sont inactifs

Starliner n’en finit visiblement pas d’avoir des fuites. L’une d’entre elles était déjà repérée avant le décollage, deux autres sont arrivées pendant le vol, une quatrième juste après l’amarrage à la Station spatiale internationale et enfin une cinquième vient d’être annoncée. Le porte-parole de la NASA, Josh Finch, explique que cette cinquième fuite avait été détectée au moment du briefing post-amarrage, comme le rapporte SpaceNews.

• Starliner a (enfin) décollé, mais déjà trois fuites détectées sur la capsule
• Starliner s’est bien arrimée à l’ISS… malgré de nouveaux problèmes

« Les ingénieurs ont évalué les réserves en hélium en fonction des taux de fuite actuels et ont déterminé que Starliner avait suffisamment de marge pour supporter le voyage de retour depuis la station » vers la Terre, explique la NASA.

Le voyage ne demande que 7h alors que la capsule dispose de 70h d’autonomie avec les fuites actuelles. Tout le temps où Starliner est accroché à la Station spatiale internationale, les collecteurs sont fermés et il n’y a donc pas de fuite d’hélium.

« Les ingénieurs évaluent également une vanne d’isolement d’oxydant RCS [Reaction Control System ou système de pilotage par jets de gaz, ndlr] dans le module de service qui n’est pas correctement fermée », ajoute l’Agence spatiale américaine.

Le retour de la mission est programmé au plus tôt le mardi 18 juin, « en fonction de la météo et de l’état de préparation du vaisseau spatial ». En. attendant, « Starliner est autorisé à effectuer des scénarios de retour d’urgence de l’équipage de la station spatiale, si nécessaire, conformément aux règles de vol ».

Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space successfully completed the first hot-fire test of its reusable Nova launch vehicle's first-stage engine, which reached 350,000 hp in under a second during a two-second test on June 5. GeekWire reports: During the two-second test, the engine ramped up to its target starting power level, producing the equivalent of 350,000 hp in less than a second, and held that power level until shutdown. At full power, the full-flow staged combustion engine is designed to produce over 100,000 pounds of thrust. The rocket engine was designed and manufactured in just 18 months. The medium-lift Nova rocket's first-stage booster will be powered by seven of the engines. Stoke successfully conducted a vertical-takeoff-and-landing test flight of its reusable second stage last September. Since then, the company has been focusing on first-stage development. For the rest of this year, Stoke expects to continue maturing its engine and vehicle design while scaling operations for orbital launch. Stoke Space said last year that it was targeting 2025 for its first orbital test flight -- but that timetable depends on progress in the development program.

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Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg: When Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and his top deputies this week unveiled a landmark arrangement with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into the iPhone, iPad and Mac, they were mum on the financial terms. Left unanswered on Monday: which company is paying the other as part of a tight collaboration that has potentially lasting monetary benefits for both. But, according to people briefed on the matter, the partnership isn't expected to generate meaningful revenue for either party -- at least at the outset. The arrangement includes weaving ChatGPT, a digital assistant that responds in plain terms to information requests, into Apple's Siri and new writing tools. Apple isn't paying OpenAI as part of the partnership, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deal terms are private. Instead, Apple believes pushing OpenAI's brand and technology to hundreds of millions of its devices is of equal or greater value than monetary payments, these people said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Chemical and manufacturing groups sued the federal government late Monday (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source) over a landmark drinking-water standard that would require cleanup of so-called forever chemicals linked to cancer and other health risks. The industry groups said that the government was exceeding its authority under the Safe Drinking Water Act by requiring that municipal water systems all but remove six synthetic chemicals, known by the acronym PFAS, that are present in the tap water of hundreds of millions of Americans. The Environmental Protection Agency has said that the new standard, put in place in April, will prevent thousands of deaths and reduce tens of thousands of serious illnesses. The E.P.A.'s cleanup standard was also expected to prompt a wave of litigation against chemical manufacturers by water utilities nationwide trying to recoup their cleanup costs. Utilities have also challenged the stringent new standard, questioning the underlying science and citing the cost of filtering the toxic chemicals out of drinking water. In a joint filing late Monday, the American Chemistry Council and National Association of Manufacturers said the E.P.A. rule was "arbitrary, capricious and an abuse of discretion." The petition was filed in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. In a separate petition, the American Water Works Association and the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies said the E.P.A. had "significantly underestimated the costs" of the rule. Taxpayers could ultimately foot the bill in the form of increased water rates, they said. PFAS, a vast class of chemicals also called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are widespread in the environment. They are commonly found in people's blood, and a 2023 government study of private wells and public water systems detected PFAS chemicals in nearly half the tap water in the country. Exposure to PFAS has been associated with developmental delays in children, decreased fertility in women and increased risk of some cancers, according to the E.P.A. [...] The E.P.A. estimates that it would cost water utilities about $1.5 billion annually to comply with the rule, though utilities have said the costs could be twice that amount. Further reading: Lawyers To Plastic Makers: Prepare For 'Astronomical' PFAS Lawsuits

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Rare Earths Norway has discovered Europe's largest proven deposit of rare earth elements in the Fen Carbonatite Complex, positioning Norway as a key player in Europe's effort to reduce reliance on China's rare earths supply. CNBC reports: Rare Earths Norway said in a June 6 statement that its Fen Carbonatite Complex in the southeast of the country boasts 8.8 million metric tons of total rare earth oxides (TREOs) with a reasonable prospect for economic extraction. Within the TREOs, which are considered vital to the global shift away from fossil fuels, the company says there is an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of magnet-related rare earths which can be used in electric vehicles and wind turbines. The discovery eclipses a massive rare earths deposit found last year in neighboring Sweden. One of the aims of the Critical Raw Materials Act is to extract at least 10% of the European Union's annual demand for rare earths by 2030 and Rare Earths Norway says it hopes to contribute to that goal. Rare Earths Norway said the rare earths deposit in Telemark, roughly 210 kilometers (130 miles) southwest of Oslo, is likely to underscore Norway's position as an integral part of Europe's rare earth and critical raw material value chain.

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Following in the European Union's footsteps, Japan's parliament has enacted a law on Wednesday that will prohibit big tech from blocking third-party app stores. AppleInsider reports: The intention of the bill is that it will facilitate competition and reduce app prices. Japan's government reportedly believes that Apple and Google are a duopoly, and that they charge developers high fees that are then passed on to users. Big tech companies with App Stores will also prohibit companies from prioritizing their own services. Google is likely to be hit hardest by this. Violators will initially be fined up to 20% of the domestic revenue of the specific service that broke the law. The fee can increase to 30%, if the behavior continues. The Japanese government's Fair Trade Commission (FTC) will choose which firms to apply it to. Companies that will be regulated will be required to submit compliance reports annually. While it hasn't been explicitly said that Apple and Google must comply, It seems certain that the announcement that they'll be held to the provisions is imminent. The Japan FTC isn't expected to add any Japanese firms to the list. The law likely won't take effect until the end of 2025.

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Intel has begun ferrying around 20 "super loads" across Ohio for the construction of its new $28 billion Ohio One Campus. The extensive planning and coordination required for these shipments are expected to cause road closures and delays during the nine days of transport. Tom's Hardware reports: Intel's new campus coming to New Albany, OH, is in heavy construction, and around 20 super loads are being ferried across Ohio's roads by the Ohio Department of Transportation after arriving at a port of the Ohio River via barge. Four of these loads, including the one hitting the road now, weigh around 900,000 pounds -- that's 400 metric tons, or 76 elephants. The super loads were first planned for February but were delayed due to the immense planning workload. Large crowds are estimated to accumulate on the route, potentially slowing it even further. Intel's 916,000-pound shipment is a "cold box," a self-standing air-processor structure that facilitates the cryogenic technology needed to fabricate semiconductors. The box is 23 feet tall, 20 feet wide, and 280 feet long, nearly the length of a football field. The immense scale of the cold box necessitates a transit process that moves at a "parade pace" of 5-10 miles per hour. Intel is taking over southern Ohio's roads for the next several weeks and months as it builds its new Ohio One Campus, a $28 billion project to create a 1,000-acre campus with two chip factories and room for more. Calling it the new "Silicon Heartland," the project will be the first leading-edge semiconductor fab in the American Midwest, and once operational, will get to work on the "Angstrom era" of Intel processes, 20A and beyond. The Ohio Department of Transportation has shared a timetable for how long this process will take.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday, Stability AI released weights for Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, an AI image-synthesis model that turns text prompts into AI-generated images. Its arrival has been ridiculed online, however, because it generate images of humans in a way that seems like a step backward from other state-of-the-art image-synthesis models like Midjourney or DALL-E 3. As a result, it can churn out wild anatomically incorrect visual abominations with ease. A thread on Reddit, titled, "Is this release supposed to be a joke? [SD3-2B]" details the spectacular failures of SD3 Medium at rendering humans, especially human limbs like hands and feet. Another thread titled, "Why is SD3 so bad at generating girls lying on the grass?" shows similar issues, but for entire human bodies. AI image fans are so far blaming the Stable Diffusion 3's anatomy fails on Stability's insistence on filtering out adult content (often called "NSFW" content) from the SD3 training data that teaches the model how to generate images. "Believe it or not, heavily censoring a model also gets rid of human anatomy, so... that's what happened," wrote one Reddit user in the thread. The release of Stable Diffusion 2.0 in 2023 suffered from similar problems in depicting humans accurately, and AI researchers soon discovered that censoring adult content that contains nudity also severely hampers an AI model's ability to generate accurate human anatomy. At the time, Stability AI reversed course with SD 2.1 and SD XL, regaining some abilities lost by excluding NSFW content. "It works fine as long as there are no humans in the picture, I think their improved nsfw filter for filtering training data decided anything humanoid is nsfw," wrote another Redditor. Basically, any time a prompt hones in on a concept that isn't represented well in its training dataset, the image model will confabulate its best interpretation of what the user is asking for. And sometimes that can be completely terrifying. Using a free online demo of SD3 on Hugging Face, we ran prompts and saw similar results to those being reported by others. For example, the prompt "a man showing his hands" returned an image of a man holding up two giant-sized backward hands, although each hand at least had five fingers.

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In a new blog post, Adobe said it has updated its terms of service to clarify that it won't train AI on customers' work. The move comes after a week of backlash from users who feared that an update to Adobe's ToS would permit such actions. The clause was included in ToS sent to Creative Cloud Suite users, which claimed that Adobe "may access, view, or listen to your Content through both automated and manual methods -- using techniques such as machine learning in order to improve our Services and Software and the user experience." The Verge reports: The new terms of service are expected to roll out on June 18th and aim to better clarify what Adobe is permitted to do with its customers' work, according to Adobe's president of digital media, David Wadhwani. "We have never trained generative AI on our customer's content, we have never taken ownership of a customer's work, and we have never allowed access to customer content beyond what's legally required," Wadhwani said to The Verge. [...] Adobe's chief product officer, Scott Belsky, acknowledged that the wording was "unclear" and that "trust and transparency couldn't be more crucial these days." Wadhwani says that the language used within Adobe's TOS was never intended to permit AI training on customers' work. "In retrospect, we should have modernized and clarified the terms of service sooner," Wadhwani says. "And we should have more proactively narrowed the terms to match what we actually do, and better explained what our legal requirements are." "We feel very, very good about the process," Wadhwani said in regards to content moderation surrounding Adobe stock and Firefly training data but acknowledged it's "never going to be perfect." Wadhwani says that Adobe can remove content that violates its policies from Firefly's training data and that customers can opt out of automated systems designed to improve the company's service. Adobe said in its blog post that it recognizes "trust must be earned" and is taking on feedback to discuss the new changes. Greater transparency is a welcome change, but it's likely going to take some time to convince scorned creatives that it doesn't hold any ill intent. "We are determined to be a trusted partner for creators in the era ahead. We will work tirelessly to make it so."

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As Qualcomm's exclusivity for Arm-powered processors for Windows PCs is reportedly coming to its end, other chipmakers are getting ready to offer their Arm-based system-on-chips for Windows computers. And, according to a new report from Reuters, MediaTek will be among the companies jumping into the Windows-on-Arm field, with plans to launch their first PC processor late next year.

MediaTek's system-on-chip for Windows PCs will rely on Arm's 'ready-made designs,' according to Reuters. Which in turn hints that MediaTek would be using Arm's compute sub-system (CSS) for client PCs, a building block designed to significantly speed up development of SoCs.

With the vauge nature of the Reuters report, however, which version of Arm's IP MediaTek might be using remains unclear, and the answer to that will largely hinge on timing. Arm refreshes its client cores and IP offerings yearly – typically announcing them to the public in May – with finished chips rolling out as early as later in the year. So depending on just how late in the year MediaTek is planning to launch their chip, the company has a large enough window to potentially use either the current 2024 client designs, or next year's 2025 designs.

For reference, Arm's 2024 CSS for client systems is quite powerful on its own. It includes two ultra-high-performance Arm Cortex-X925 cores (each with up to 3MB L2 cache and clock speeds over 3.60 GHz, supporting SVE and SVE2), four high-performance Cortex-A725 cores, two energy-efficient Cortex-A520 cores, and an Immortalis-G925 graphics processor. And, of course, MediaTek has the expertise to skip Arm's CSS and build their own bespoke designs as well, if that's what they'd prefer.

Overall, the latest client designs from Arm can accommodate up to 14 CPU cores – Arm intentionally leaves headroom for designs to be scaled-up for laptops – which would make for quite a formidable chip. But the PC SoC market has no shortage of capable contenders with their own designs; besides Qualcomm's Snapdragon X processors, MediaTek would also be going up against the latest designs from Intel and AMD. All of whom are planning to make big plays for the mobile PC market in the next several months. So MediaTek will need to make a serious effort if their effort to jump into the PC SoC market are to succeed.

Since 2016, Microsoft has partnered with Qualcomm to bring Arm's processor architecture, which is widely used in smartphones, to Windows PCs. Qualcomm has an exclusive agreement to supply these chips for the next several months (the exact timing remains unclear), after which other designers like MediaTek can enter the market. Qualcomm, for its part, has benefited greatly from collaborating with Microsoft, so it will be interesting to see if Microsoft extends a similar hand out to other Arm chip makers.

Ultimately, the market for Arm PC SoCs has the potential to get crowded quickly. According to previous reports from Reuters, both AMD and NVIDIA are also developing Arm-based chips for Windows. So if all of those projects come to fruition, there could potentially be several Arm SoCs available to PC manufacturers around the same time. All of which would be a massive change from the past 20 years of the PC, where Intel and AMD have been the entire market.

Both MediaTek and Microsoft have declined to comment on the ongoing developments, the news agency states.

The European Union on Wednesday said it would impose higher tariffs on Chinese electric vehicle imports, which it found benefit "heavily from unfair subsidies" and pose a "threat of economic injury" to EV producers in Europe. CNBC reports: On a preliminary basis, the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, concluded that the battery-electric vehicles value chain in China "benefits from unfair subsidization" and pronounced that it is in the EU's interest to impose "provisional countervailing duties" on BEV imports from China. The additional tariffs are the result of an EU probe that began in October. The duties are currently provisional, but will be introduced from July 4 in the event of unfruitful talks with Chinese authorities to reach a resolution, the commission said in a statement. Definitive measures will be placed within four months of the imposition of provisional duties. [...] The bloc is imposing a 38.1% tariff on battery-electric vehicle producers who did not cooperate with its investigation, and a lower 21% duty on carmakers in the Asian country who complied but have not been "sampled." The commission also disclosed a set of individual tariffs, which [Valdis Dombrovskis, the EU commissioner for trade, said] are linked to their cooperation with the probe and with the amount of information they supplied. Rates are lower for those companies who shared details, he added. Main Chinese BEV producer BYD was struck with a 17.4% tariff, with Geely slapped with a 20% duty. The EU has also imposed its 38.1% tariff on autos firm SAIC. All three producers were sampled in the EU probe, which is ongoing. Meanwhile, taxes on imported Chinese EVs in the United States are set to quadruple from 25% to 100%, starting this year.

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The FreeBSD Foundation has published the results of the FreeBSD Community Survey that reveal interesting insights about FreeBSD usage and its users...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: The revelation earlier this year that General Motors had been selling driver behavior patterns to data brokers -- who in turn packaged and resold it to insurers -- has led at least one of two major data brokers to shut down its related product. That data broker, Verisk, disclosed last month that it has stopped accepting data from car makers and no longer sells the information to insurers, according to the organization Privacy4Cars, which received the response after sending the data broker an inquiry. "Verisk received driving data from vehicles manufactured by General Motors, Honda, and Hyundai and may have provided a Driving Behavior Data History Report ("Report") to insurers upon request, as a service provider to such insurers, that included certain data provided by these manufacturers," the Verisk response to Privacy4Cars said. "Please note that Verisk no longer receives this data from these automakers to generate Reports and also no longer provides Reports to insurers," the statement added. While Verisk has stopped selling car company-provided driver behavior patterns to insurers, LexisNexis Risk Solutions continues to prominently promote its driver behavior data product for insurers despite the mounting backlash from state governments, federal officials and consumer groups. LexisNexis Risk Solutions' Telematics OnDemand page remains online, boasting that it is "bringing automakers and insurance carriers together." "By partnering directly with automotive OEMs, LexisNexis is able to turn connected car data into tangible driving behavior insights that can be leveraged within insurance carriers' existing workflows," the page says. Much of LexisNexis Risk Solutions' work remains shrouded in secrecy.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Google's continued abuse of the Fitbit brand is continuing with the shutdown of the web dashboard;. Fitbit.com used to be both a storefront and a way for users to get a big-screen UI to sift through reams of fitness data. The store closed up shop in April, and now the web dashboard is dying in July. In a post on the "Fitbit Community" forums, the company said: "Next month, weâ(TM)re consolidating the Fitbit.com dashboard into the Fitbit app. The web browser will no longer offer access to the Fitbit.com dashboard after July 8, 2024." That's it. There's no replacement and no new Fitness thing Google is more interested in; web functionality is just being removed. Google, we'll remind you, used to be a web company. Now it's a phone app or nothing. Google did the same thing to its own Google Fit product in 2019, killing off the more powerful website in favor of an app focus.

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Qualcomm faces potential disruption to its Windows on Arm laptops due to a legal battle with Arm, while MediaTek prepares to enter the market. Qualcomm's exclusivity deal with Microsoft for Copilot+ PCs, based on its Snapdragon SoCs, is set to expire this year. MediaTek plans to launch its own Windows on Arm chip in late 2024, though it's unclear if it has Microsoft's approval. The legal dispute stems from Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia, with Arm claiming Nuvia's licenses are non-transferable without permission. Arm terminated the licenses, requiring Qualcomm to stop using processor designs developed under those agreements. Arm asserts current Copilot+ SoCs descend from Nuvia's chips, potentially subjecting them to an injunction if Arm prevails in court. Qualcomm maintains its existing Arm license rights cover its custom CPUs. Both companies declined to comment on the ongoing legal matter.

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Proton 9.0-2 is out this afternoon as the Valve/CodeWeavers downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for running Windows games under Linux within the Steam client...

A hacker has gained access to internal tools used by the location tracking company Tile, including one that processes location data requests for law enforcement, and stolen a large amount of customer data, such as their names, physical addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers, 404 Media reports. From the report: The stolen data itself does not include the location of Tile devices, which are small pieces of hardware users attach to their keys or other items to monitor remotely. But it is still a significant breach that shows how tools intended for internal use by company workers can be accessed and then leveraged by hackers to collect sensitive data en masse. It also shows that this type of company, one which tracks peoples' locations, can become a target for hackers. "Basically I had access to everything," the hacker told 404 Media in an online chat. The hacker says they also demanded payment from Tile but did not receive a response. Tile sells various tracking devices which can be located through Tile's accompanying app. Life360, another location data focused company, acquired Tile in November 2021. The hacker says they obtained login credentials for a Tile system that they believe belonged to a former Tile employee. One tool specifically says it can be used to "initiate data access, location, or law enforcement requests." Users can then lookup Tile customers by their phone number or another identifier, according to a screenshot of the tool.

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