Bytes: What’s new in tech
Japan completed a test last month with the first fully autonomous container ship, said Nicolás Rivero in Quartz. “Using a system of radar and lidar sensors, cameras, and a satellite compass,” the 313-footlong unmanned ship, the Mikage, left its port on the Sea of Japan “and traveled 161 nautical miles to Osaka.”There, the ship “pulled itself into a berth, using flying drones to drop ropes down to dock workers waiting to secure the ship.” Though other “robot ships” have sailed in open water, this was the first time “a container ship set sail and docked itself.” One caveat: Even if the technology is there, the CEO of shipping giant Maersk says, he doubts that mega-sized 1,300-footlong ships weighing 200,000 tons will ever be allowed to sail with no humans onboard.
Elon Musk versus the sun
SpaceX lost 40 satellites to a surprise solar storm, said Jackie Wattles in CNN.com. Elon Musk’s space-exploration startup launched 49 of its small Starlink communication satellites on Feb. 3. But before they were able to completely exit the atmosphere, they were knocked out of commission last week. “Streams of energized particles, or solar winds, emitted from the sun” days earlier thickened the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The storm added enough atmospheric drag that the satellites “weren’t able to reach their intended orbit” and are expected to disintegrate. Astronomers say the sun is entering an active period of its solar cycle, producing more “solar flares and mass ejection events” that could interfere with future space launches.
MoviePass will be watching you
The return of MoviePass affirms “you can’t keep a ridiculous Silicon Valley idea down,” said Rebecca Alter in New York magazine. The original app—which offered $10 monthly subscriptions to “see basically any movie in basically any theater”—flopped in 2019 after the venture capitalists who backed the concept “lost hundreds of millions of their own dollars.” But last week, MoviePass co-founder and
CEO Stacy Spikes announced that a redesigned app will be back this summer. This time there will be “tiered plans,” and “different movies and different times, dates, and locations” will cost different amounts of credits. “The scary part comes in with the introduction of a new feature called PreShow, which plays ads in the app.” In a dystopian twist, the app employs facial-recognition software to make sure users “watch an ad without looking away.”
ID.me overwhelmed by requests
The IRS may be backing away from the facial-recognition services firm ID.me, but other federal and state agencies are not, said Corin Faife in The Verge. The IRS suspended plans last week to make taxpayers scan their government ID and take a selfie in order to access their online account through an ID.me portal. But the company still “plays a central role in how claimants access benefits across the U.S., working on behalf of 27 state-level unemployment insurance programs” as well as Veterans Affairs. Employees of ID.me have complained about “target quotas that left them struggling to keep pace” with the backlog of requests for human verification reviews. Meanwhile, the company promised and then retracted a 20 percent bonus for junior staff.