Science and Technology (old posts, page 187)

What Elon Musk wore to the White House foreshadowed his downfall

The sloppy sartorial style of political insiders, from Musk to Dominic Cummings, reveals who has the privilege to be scruffy – but it may also signal their undoing

In case you missed it, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have fallen out.

For some – and in particular anyone looking at the tech billionaire’s White House wardrobe – this will come as little surprise. Long before anyone hit send on those inflammatory tweets, or tensions spilled out over Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB), Musk’s political downfall was written in the stitching.

Continue reading...

Astronaut mission postponed amid leak concerns at International Space Station

Chartered spaceflight for India, Poland and Hungary’s first astronauts in decades delayed indefinitely

A chartered spaceflight for India, Poland and Hungary’s first astronauts in decades has been delayed indefinitely because of leak concerns at the International Space Station.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) said on Thursday that it had postponed the Axiom Mission 4 to the ISS to monitor the cabin pressure on the Russian side of the orbiting lab before accepting visitors. Officials stressed that the seven astronauts currently at the space station were safe and that other operations up there would not be affected.

Continue reading...

[$] CoMaps emerges as an Organic Maps fork

The open-source mobile app Organic Maps is used by millions of people on both the Android and iOS platforms. In addition to featuring offline maps (generated from OpenStreetMap cartography) and turn-by-turn navigation, it also promises its users greater privacy than proprietary options. However, controversial decisions taken by the project's leaders, feelings of disenfranchisement among contributors, and even accusations of embezzlement have precipitated a divide in the community, leading to a new fork called CoMaps.

Radicle Desktop released

The Radicle peer-to-peer code collaboration project has released Radicle Desktop: a graphical interface designed to simplify more complex parts of using Radicle such as issue management and patch reviews.

Radicle Desktop is not trying to replace your terminal, IDE, or code editor - you already have your preferred tools for code browsing. It won't replace our existing app.radicle.xyz and search.radicle.xyz for finding and exploring projects. It also doesn't run a node for you. Instead, it communicates with your existing Radicle node, supporting your current workflow and encourages gradual adoption.

LWN covered Radicle in March 2024.

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, glibc, kernel, and mod_security), Fedora (chromium, gh, mingw-icu, nginx-mod-modsecurity, python3.10, python3.9, thunderbird, valkey, and yarnpkg), Oracle (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, glibc, grafana-pcp, kernel, libxml2, mod_security, nodejs:20, and thunderbird), SUSE (audiofile, helm, kubernetes-old, kubernetes1.23, kubernetes1.24, libcryptopp, postgresql15, thunderbird, and valkey), and Ubuntu (linux-nvidia-tegra-igx).

MindsEye review – a dystopian future that plays like it’s from 2012

PC (version tested), PlayStation 5, Xbox; Build a Rocket Boy/IOI Partners
A lot of work and ambition have gone into this strange, sometimes likable cover-shooter throwback

There’s a Sphere-alike in Redrock, MindsEye’s open-world version of Las Vegas. It’s pretty much a straight copy of the original: a huge soap bubble, half sunk into the desert floor, with its surface turned into a gigantic TV. Occasionally you’ll pull up near the Sphere while driving an electric vehicle made by Silva, the megacorp that controls this world. You’ll sometimes come to a stop just as an advert for an identical Silva EV plays out on the huge curved screen overhead. The doubling effect can be slightly vertigo-inducing.

At these moments, I truly get what MindsEye is trying to do. You’re stuck in the ultimate company town, where oligarchs and other crooks run everything, and there’s no hope of escaping the ecosystem they’ve built. MindsEye gets this all across through a chance encounter, and in a way that’s both light of touch and clever. The rest of the game tends towards the heavy-handed and silly, but it’s nice to glimpse a few instances where everything clicks.

Continue reading...