The FaceApp Privacy Panic, a Mysterious Satellite Outage, and More News
Credit to Author: Alex Baker-Whitcomb| Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2019 22:52:00 +0000
FaceApp isn't alone in the land of privacy concerns, a curious week-long satellite outage for Europe has finally ended, and WIRED did the math on what it would take to bike to the moon. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less.
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Think FaceApp is scary? Wait until you hear about Facebook
Everyone is talking about FaceApp, the app that uses AI to turn your friends into much, much older versions of themselves in photos. Yes, it's run by a Russian company that sends your photos to its servers, retains rights to use them in perpetuity, and performs AI black magic on them. But before you shake your fist too hard, you should also know a lot of your favorite apps also do that already.
Europe's week-long satellite outage is over—but serves as a warning
A week of Europe's Galileo satellite navigation system mysteriously went down, the system is largely back online. More than 100 million devices can receive Galileo's signal for global positioning, and if they hadn't been programmed to fall back on GPS in its absence, the outage could have been a massive humanitarian crisis. While we still don't know exactly what caused the downtime, it serves as a chilling reminder of our dependence on fallible technology.
Wondering how long it might take you to bike to the moon? Our resident physicist did the math. The moon is about 240,000 miles away, but all kinds of factors—changing gravity, power output, and obviously suspending reality—impact how long it would take to get there. All that being said, he figures you could make the trip in, drumroll please, 267 days.
Why have coffee, when you can have delicious, creamy espresso? Save the trip to treat yourself with one of these great portable espresso makers.
This week marks the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11's lunar landing. Here's our WIRED guide to everything you should know about the moon.
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