Search for Mars ET on
Zuckerberg hits Cook back
Facebook (FB) founder Mark Zuckerberg is taking personally all the comments of Apple CEO Tim Cook, including allegedly treating its customers as products.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) quoted Zuckerberg as telling trusted employees that they “need to inflict pain” on Apple in response to its criticisms of FB’s privacy policies.
FB is mulling filing a lawsuit against Apple, averring that the smartphone maker’s policies are posing unfair competition.
FB chief wants to ‘inflict pain’ on Apple.
The WSJ story took note that FB sided with Epic Games in the latter’s battle against Apple over restrictions and profit-sharing in its App Store.
But FB is not only fighting Apple as the paper noted that it is also fighting antitrust allegations in some countries.
Apple has hit FB and Google’s business model as violating the right to privacy of people because the two companies employ tracking in their platforms.
Cook has been hitting Zuckerberg publicly as early as 2018 when he gloated that the Cambridge Analytica scandal that hit FB will not happen to Apple as it is not engaged in “invasion of privacy.”
A year before, Zuckerberg and Cook met to stop their soured relation from spinning out of control, but the meeting “resulted in a tense standoff.”
“The disputes reached new prominence last year, when Apple announced plans to require that iOS apps ask users for permission to track them with IDFA (ID For Advertisers) tags across apps and websites,” Ars Technica (AT) reported. “The policy change is already reflected in Apple’s terms of service for app developers but will not be enforced until early spring, after the release of iOS 14.5,” AT added.
Cook and Zuckerberg, however, agreed that “the next computing platform” will have to do with augmented and mixed reality.
WASHINGTON (AFP) — After a seven-month journey, NASA’s Perseverance rover prepares to touch down on Mars on Thursday after first negotiating a risky landing procedure that will mark the start of its multi-year search for signs of ancient microbial life.
The Mars 2020 mission, which set off late from Florida in late July, includes the largest ever vehicle to be dispatched to the Red Planet.
Built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it weighs a ton, has a robotic arm that’s seven feet (two meters) long, has 19 cameras, and two microphones to record the Martian soundscape.
Should it arrive intact, Perseverance will be only the fifth rover to complete the journey since Pathfinder in 1997. All have been American and the last, Curiosity, is still active.
China last week placed its Tianwen-1 spacecraft in orbit around Mars carrying both a lander and a rover, which it is hoped to land in May.
At around 3:55 p.m. EST Thursday (2055 GMT), Perseverance will place its six wheels on a landing site described as “spectacular” by Ken Farley, a NASA scientist.
Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer-wide) basin located in the Martian northern hemisphere, had been considered for previous missions but was considered too difficult to land in until now.
Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the mission control room will have fewer people than normal.
“But assuming we do have confirmation of landing, I don’t think Covid is gonna be able to stop us from jumping up and down and fist pumping,” said Matt Wallace, the mission’s deputy project manager.
The first low-resolution photos of the surface will arrive quickly. Video footage, including entry into the atmosphere, is expected later.
Scientists believe that around 3.5 billion years ago, the crater was home to a river that flowed into a lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta.
During this period, “Mars was very similar to Earth in several important ways,” said Farley, suggesting there may have been extra-terrestrial life there once.
“It had a substantial atmosphere, it had lakes and rivers on its surface, and it had habitable environments, places where organisms that we know about on earth today could have thrived.”
Perseverance will be only the fifth rover to complete the journey since Pathfinder in 1997.
Mars is the only known place where such conditions arose outside our planet. Mars 2020 is the first mission with the explicit aim of finding evidence that life once existed there.
For several years, Perseverance will collect and store up to 30 rock and soil samples that will eventually be returned to Earth where labs will analyze them.
Its top speed is 152 meters per hour (about 0.1 miles per hour) — sluggish by Earth standards but faster than any of its predecessors, as it traverses first the delta, then the ancient lakeshore, and finally the edges of the crater.
The rover could return the samples as part of a planned joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency in the 2030s. “The scientists who will analyze these samples are in school today, they might not even be born yet,” Farley said.