Bytes: What’s new in tech

SpaceX’s secret satellite network

SpaceX has a classified contract to build a network of spy satellites for U.S. intelligence, said Joey Roulette and Marisa Taylor in Reuters. The network could eventually “enable the U.S. government to quickly capture continuous imagery of activities on the ground anywhere on the globe.” The $1.8 billion National Reconnaissance Office contract was signed in 2021 but not known to the public until last week. The Pentagon “is already a big SpaceX customer, using its Falcon 9 rockets to launch military payloads into space.” SpaceX’s Starlink satellite-internet service has been instrumental in Ukraine’s military resistance against Russia. The NRO project, under a different SpaceX business unit called Starshield, would go well beyond beaming connectivity. “No one can hide,” said one source about the network’s potential reach.

YouTube will label AI-created videos

YouTube this week started requiring content creators to label videos that were created using AI tools, said Clare Duffy in CNN.com. The Google-owned video platform said users uploading videos will now “see a checklist asking if their content makes a real person say or do something they didn’t do, alters footage of a real place or event, or depicts a realisticlooking scene that didn’t actually occur.” If a user checks “yes” to any of those disclaimers, YouTube will automatically “add a label in the description.” YouTube is only requiring that creators check the box for content that looks realistic enough to confuse users. No disclosure is necessary if the content is “clearly unrealistic” or “inconsequential,” such as lighting or color adjustments.

Facebook’s thriving online bazaar

Facebook’s Marketplace is keeping the platform relevant for Gen Z, said Melissa Rohman in The New York Times. Facebook has ceded most of its popularity as a social site for young people to other platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. But there’s one lure that has kept Gen Z coming back: opportunities to score deals on secondhand goods. Facebook Marketplace, where users can sell items to one another, is a boon “for a generation that loves thrift shopping.” Launched in 2016, Marketplace now boasts “over a billion monthly active users and is the second-most popular online site for secondhand goods, behind eBay.” Because most deals are done locally, sellers can avoid transaction fees by “asking buyers to bring cash.”