Unfortunately, the LightSail spacecraft's recovery wasn't quite as miraculous as its creators first thought. The Planetary Society reports that it hasn't heard back from its sailer since Wednesday, shortly after the vehicle deployed its solar panels. The ground crew suspects that the failure might be due to a battery glitch, since the energy cells largely stopped drawing a current after the panels deployed. Attempts to wake up LightSail with "blind" commands (that is, without confirmed contact) haven't helped, so there's no simple fix.
Apple Pay's tap-to-buy service might not be confined to the US for much longer. The Telegraph's sources hear that Apple will use next week's Worldwide Developer Conference to announce the UK launch of its mobile payment service this summer. Reportedly, the company will flick the switch sometime in the next two months. It's not clear exactly which companies have signed up, but 9to5Mac claims that big bank Lloyds TSB is a launch partner; MasterCard, meanwhile, says that it's "absolutely ready" for an Apple Pay debut in Great Britain. There's no word of a similarly quick introduction for other countries (sorry Canada), but it's evident that Apple wants to spread its shopping tech far and wide before rivals show up.
If you're one of the fortunate few software developers to have scored HTC's Vivevirtual reality headset, you'll want to keep an eye out for a delivery truck in the near future. Valve has confirmed that it's shipping the Vive Developer Edition to a "wide range" of teams, ranging from indie game studios to big-name movie producers. It's not clear how many got their VR headgear, although Owlchemy Labs' Devin Reimer has revealed that he's on the short list. You'll still have to wait until the end of the year to snag a Vive if you're a regular gamer, unfortunately. Still, the developer release at least suggests that the public launch is on track.
In 2010, Anthony Elonis threatened his estranged wife by writing rants on his Facebook page such as, "There's one way to love you but a thousand ways to kill you. I'm not going to rest until your body is a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts."
For making these threats, a federal district court sentenced him to more than three years in prison.
Just how bad was the hack that compromised the info of 4 million US government workers? Exceptionally bad, if you ask anonymous officials talking to Reuters. They understand that the Office of Personnel Management breach exposed data going as far back in time as 1985, which could reveal what about 1.9 million staffers did after they left federal employment. It's not certain exactly what was taken, but the hack may have exposed bank info, birthdays and Social Security numbers -- the kind of sensitive content that could lead to breaches elsewhere.
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Google's Android Open Source Project (AOSP) rolled out in 2007 with the goal of creating a unified framework for mobile operating systems and, in turn, expediting the development of mobile products. The core of the code was open to everyone, but to help guarantee quality products -- and promote its own services in the face of Apple's iOS -- Google also organized the Open Handset Alliance (OHA). Companies who pledged allegiance to this group effectively committed to certain standards of quality for any resultant Android hardware and software. Membership in the OHA, however, is not a requirement for AOSP and so numerous forked (read: compatible and non-compatible) versions, like Amazon's Fire OS, have been developed over the years. We've pinpointed just a few of these to highlight the vibrant -- and often political -- undercurrent of Android's alternate identities.
You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have: the forks of Android life.
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There's a super-secret group of internet trolls in Russia that's causing problems not only online, but also in US cities. The so-called Internet Research Agency caused a ruckus in Louisiana last September with fake reports of an accident at a chemical plant -- reports that eventually made national news. To find out more about the organization, Adrian Chen took a trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, in April and found himself in the group's crosshairs.
Amazon's ambitions for gaming apparently go quite a bit beyond the mobile space and "hit" consumer hardware. The e-commerce juggernaut is looking for folks to help flesh out the development team of its first PC game and placed a job posting on Gamasutra in an effort to make that happen. As Polygon notes, the studio already has the likes of Portal's Kim Swift and former Ubisoft developer Clint Hocking (Far Cry 2) on board, and the job listing says that designers whose resumés include Halo, Half-life 2 and The Last of Us are involved as well.
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