The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope
Earlier this week, China’s radio telescope, Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), began to search for signs of life from stars and galaxies. The telescope, which sits in a basin in southwest China, is the world’s largest telescope, spanning half a kilometer in diameter, and is one of the products of China’s drive to increase their standing in scientific knowledge. Its size is not just for show either; FAST is twice as sensitive and has up to ten times the surveying speed as the world’s second largest radio telescope, the Arecibo Observatory, located in Puerto Rico.
Misuse of Databases by Police
The Associated Press (AP) reported findings that police have been abusing their access to state driver and federal criminal history databases. What may be even more troubling is that the officers who are caught are seldom punished if they are caught misusing confidential information.
“The idea that police would betray that trust out of curious entertainment or truly bad intent, that’s very disturbing and unsettling,” Major Christopher Carothers, officer at Miami’s professional compliance bureau, said in an interview with the AP.
One example of misuse occurred in Florida, when a group of Miami-Dade officers stalked and harassed a Florida Highway Trooper because she arrested another Miami-Dade officer for speeding. Other misuses of database information included stalking romantic interests, business partners and family.
Broken Windows 10 Update
Windows 10 operating system users have suffered problems while trying to install the newest update. The update has caused computers to restart multiple times when the machine goes into a cycle of failed installation, restart, failed re-installation, restart, etc. For some users, the update installed correctly after a while, but other users report the update failing over and over again, resulting in their computer being inoperative.
This is not the first update that has caused problems for Microsoft users; Millions of webcams were broken with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update in August.
Netflix Outage
Netflix released its new TV series Luke Cage on Friday, but viewers did not get much time to enjoy it because the streaming service becoming unavailable on Saturday from 3:00 p.m. EST for approximately three hours. The most likely reason for the outage was heavy usage. A similar situation occurred with Amazon in 2012 around Christmas time when there was an issue with Amazon Web Services.
The company has also dropped their selections by over 50 percent from about 11,000 titles in 2012 to just over 5,000 titles. The company plans to advertise more of their original shows, while cutting back on other licensed shows and movies.
“You should expect us to push toward more 50/50 in terms of original exclusive content and licensed content,” David Wells, CFO of Netflix, said at Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference.
Netflix viewers clearly seem to be content with the drop-off, and viewers can continue to expect the company relying on its original, exclusive content to keep pulling in new customers. By the end of 2016, the company plans to have over 600 hours of original content online for viewers to watch.
Facebook Collects Data from WhatsApp in Germany
Germany’s privacy watchdog mandated that Facebook must stop collecting user information, such as phone numbers, from WhatsApp. Back in 2014 when WhatsApp was bought by Facebook, it was understood that user information from WhatsApp would be kept private.
However, this August, Facebook announced a policy change that allowed WhatsApp user information to be shared with Facebook so that friend suggestions and advertising are more user-specific. Although the companies say that the data-sharing will reduce the amount of spam and fraud, privacy advocates are concerned about how the information is being used.
“This administrative order protects the data of about 35 million WhatsApp users in Germany. It has to be their decision, whether they want to connect their account with Facebook. Therefore, Facebook has to ask for their permission in advance. This has not happened,” Johannes Caspar, the Hamburg data protection commissioner, said in a statement.
Facebook has since appealed the order.
