Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who flew on the much-delayed first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner craft, won’t be coming home from the International Space Station until sometime next month, well past their originally planned return date of June 14. NASA announced last night that it’s pushing the date of their return trip back even further in order to allow for more reviews into problems that arose with Starliner during its flight, and to avoid conflicts with upcoming spacewalks. As of now, there’s no date set for the flight back to Earth.
Starliner launched on June 5 and delivered Wilmore and Williams to the ISS about a day later. Their stay was only supposed to last a week or so. During the flight, however, four small helium leaks sprung in the propulsion system, on top of the one that had already been identified prior to launch. And, when Starliner first attempted to approach the ISS on June 6 and begin docking, five of its 28 thrusters went offline. Boeing was able to get four of them back up and running. NASA also revealed a few days after launch that the teams were looking into an issue with a valve in the service module that was “not properly closed.”
The space agency had already pushed the date of the return trip back a few times over the last week and most recently landed on June 26, but now says the flight won’t take place until after the spacewalks planned for June 24 and July 2 have been completed. “We are letting the data drive our decision making relative to managing the small helium system leaks and thruster performance we observed during rendezvous and docking,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, on Friday.
This adjustment deconflicts from a series of spacewalks while allowing mission teams time to… pic.twitter.com/pjqz1zEu4g
— NASA Commercial Crew (@Commercial_Crew) June 22, 2024
“Starliner is performing well in orbit while docked to the space station,” Stich also said. “We are strategically using the extra time to clear a path for some critical station activities while completing readiness for Butch and Suni’s return on Starliner and gaining valuable insight into the system upgrades we will want to make for post-certification missions.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/starliner-astronauts-return-trip-has-been-pushed-back-even-further-174336571.html?src=rss
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who flew on the much-delayed first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner craft, won’t be coming home from the International Space Station until sometime next month, well past their originally planned return date of June 14. NASA announced last night that it’s pushing the date of their return trip back even further in order to allow for more reviews into problems that arose with Starliner during its flight, and to avoid conflicts with upcoming spacewalks. As of now, there’s no date set for the flight back to Earth.
Starliner launched on June 5 and delivered Wilmore and Williams to the ISS about a day later. Their stay was only supposed to last a week or so. During the flight, however, four small helium leaks sprung in the propulsion system, on top of the one that had already been identified prior to launch. And, when Starliner first attempted to approach the ISS on June 6 and begin docking, five of its 28 thrusters went offline. Boeing was able to get four of them back up and running. NASA also revealed a few days after launch that the teams were looking into an issue with a valve in the service module that was “not properly closed.”
The space agency had already pushed the date of the return trip back a few times over the last week and most recently landed on June 26, but now says the flight won’t take place until after the spacewalks planned for June 24 and July 2 have been completed. “We are letting the data drive our decision making relative to managing the small helium system leaks and thruster performance we observed during rendezvous and docking,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, on Friday.
This adjustment deconflicts from a series of spacewalks while allowing mission teams time to… pic.twitter.com/pjqz1zEu4g
— NASA Commercial Crew (@Commercial_Crew) June 22, 2024
“Starliner is performing well in orbit while docked to the space station,” Stich also said. “We are strategically using the extra time to clear a path for some critical station activities while completing readiness for Butch and Suni’s return on Starliner and gaining valuable insight into the system upgrades we will want to make for post-certification missions.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/starliner-astronauts-return-trip-has-been-pushed-back-even-further-174336571.html?src=rss
Some actors come into a superhero role fairly early in their careers. Others do so in the middle, which can carry some extra weight if this comes as their star profile is growing. And sometimes you have the ones that are fighting to be cast in something because they’re pretty confident they’d be an ace at it.
Summer Game Fest 2024 officially wrapped up on June 10, after a long weekend of game previews, developer interviews and unlimited cold brew — but we just published our final stories from the show this week (held under embargo, of course). Those were Mat Smith’s impressions of Black Myth: Wukong and Tales of the Shire, and they capped off a month of juicy video game news out of the summer’s biggest show.
On top of the playable previews, Day of the Devs, Devolver, Xbox and Ubisoft held their own showcases brimming with new information and game reveals, and the big Summer Game Fest kickoff event was similarly stacked. Just to name a few of the hits: There’s a new Doomwith a medieval flair (and flail), Civilization VII is coming out in 2025, Slitterheadwill land on November 8, Heart Machine is building a gorgeous-looking platformer called Possessor(s), and the Fablereboot is due out in 2025. There are also new Xbox Series consoles coming out this fall — and as it turns out, Microsoft’s mid-cycle refresh says a lot about the Xbox hardware business as a whole, especially when compared to the company’s internal roadmap that leaked in October 2022.
After E3 collapsed on itself like a sad soufflé, Summer Game Fest has emerged as the home of mid-year video game goodness, offering a little more room for smaller studios and plenty of space to grow. It’s been four years of digital and physical Summer Game Fest events at this point, and the show just keeps getting better.
Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/take-a-behind-the-scenes-tour-of-summer-game-fest-play-days-2024-153009861.html?src=rss
Summer Game Fest 2024 officially wrapped up on June 10, after a long weekend of game previews, developer interviews and unlimited cold brew — but we just published our final stories from the show this week (held under embargo, of course). Those were Mat Smith’s impressions of Black Myth: Wukong and Tales of the Shire, and they capped off a month of juicy video game news out of the summer’s biggest show.
On top of the playable previews, Day of the Devs, Devolver, Xbox and Ubisoft held their own showcases brimming with new information and game reveals, and the big Summer Game Fest kickoff event was similarly stacked. Just to name a few of the hits: There’s a new Doomwith a medieval flair (and flail), Civilization VII is coming out in 2025, Slitterheadwill land on November 8, Heart Machine is building a gorgeous-looking platformer called Possessor(s), and the Fablereboot is due out in 2025. There are also new Xbox Series consoles coming out this fall — and as it turns out, Microsoft’s mid-cycle refresh says a lot about the Xbox hardware business as a whole, especially when compared to the company’s internal roadmap that leaked in October 2022.
After E3 collapsed on itself like a sad soufflé, Summer Game Fest has emerged as the home of mid-year video game goodness, offering a little more room for smaller studios and plenty of space to grow. It’s been four years of digital and physical Summer Game Fest events at this point, and the show just keeps getting better.
Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/take-a-behind-the-scenes-tour-of-summer-game-fest-play-days-2024-153009861.html?src=rss
Last month, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes came to theaters, bringing with it a new set of characters positioned to continue the human/ape war established in Caesar’s reboot trilogy. If you somehow managed to miss it in theaters over the last six weeks—where it’s kept making money!— or were just waiting to watch it…
Thanks to the convoluted nature of geography-based licensing among the major studios, streaming services with international reach can have much more comprehensive selections of TV shows and movies in a different country. That’s why savvy viewers have long used VPNs – virtual private networks – to expand their options. Change your location from the US to the UK and, voila, you suddenly have access to Friends and The Office on Netflix again.
That’s great if you’re watching on a phone, tablet or PC, where installing and activating a VPN is as generally as simple as visiting the device’s app store. But streaming through a VPN is a bit more challenging on a TV. Thankfully, there are quite a few ways to get that VPN-filtered content on the biggest screen in your home. Below, we’ll walk you through unlocking geo-blocked content on your TV.
If you don’t already have a VPN subscription, we’d suggest choosing a service from our list of best VPNs. And with the notable exception of Proton VPN, we’d strongly recommend avoiding any free VPN options.
How to stream video to your smart TV using a VPN
The easiest way to install a VPN on your smart TV is to download it from the built-in app store – if your preferred VPN is available. Among the top smart TV platforms, Amazon’s Fire TV and Google TV are your best bets for built-in support. If your set doesn’t run those operating systems, you can add them to any TV with a free HDMI port for as little as $30. Meanwhile, the pricier Apple TV supports a growing list of VPNs as well. Roku, unfortunately, does not support built-in VPN apps.
Fire TV
Amazon’s Fire TV operating system has a wide range of content to binge-watch, as it comes with access to Prime Video’s expansive catalog. Thankfully, its user interface is easy to navigate, making installing a VPN a breeze.
Amazon’s Fire TV Stick line is a very VPN-friendly streaming platform.
Amazon
To set up a VPN, navigate to the Fire TV app store and search for the VPN service to which you’re subscribed. Fire TV has multiple options on the app store, including most of the services mentioned in our aforementioned best VPNs list.
From there, the process is pretty simple: Download the app, log in and connect to the VPN. When you obfuscate your IP address using the VPN and connect to a different country, you’ll unlock its Prime Video content library.
Google TV
Google TV is a smart TV operating system with a sleek user interface that supports thousands of apps, including VPNs and streaming platforms. As with Fire TV, just download your VPN app of choice, input your credentials and run it before activating the streaming service you’d like to check out. While Google TV doesn’t have as robust a VPN library as Fire TV, it currently has a wider selection than Apple TV (see below).
Apple TV
If you want to install a VPN on your Apple TV directly, you’ll need tvOS 17 or later. If not, you can follow our alternative workarounds below.
Apple TV boxes have become more VPN-friendly with recent OS updates.
Devindra Hardawar/Engadget
For those with tvOS 17 and later, setting up a VPN on your Apple TV is simple. However, it’s important to note that it doesn’t support many services, so you’ll have to double-check that the VPN you subscribe to has Apple TV compatibility.
AirPlay or Google Cast from a VPN-enabled device
There are two distinctions between screen casting and mirroring. The former is when you stream content on a device, cast it on your smart TV and still use the device for other purposes without interrupting what you’re streaming. The latter is when you show everything you’re doing on your device on your TV. For example, if you’re streaming a movie and tab out, your smart TV will mirror everything you’re doing.
As with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto in vehicles, there are Apple and Google flavors of screencasting: AirPlay and Google Cast (formerly Chromecast). In each case, you start by running your VPN of choice on your phone or tablet, firing up your streaming app, starting your movie or TV show and simply clicking the AirPlay or Google Cast icon when streaming the video. If your TV doesn’t have AirPlay or Google Cast built-in, you can buy a set-top box that supports one or the other.
AirPlay is probably the most well-known casting and mirroring technology, and it currently works on a wide range of smart TVs and set-top boxes. I screencasted from my iPhone XR with a VPN enabled to my Samsung UHD TV and everything worked without a hitch.
On the Google side, click the icon with a TV and Wi-Fi rays to start casting your content to the big screen.
Note that Amazon is working on a rival screencasting platform called Matter Casting, but it’s not widely supported yet.
HDMI from a VPN-enabled device
If you don’t want to fiddle with wireless protocols, an underrated and lesser-known way to stream video to your TV using a VPN is via an HDMI cable. You’ll need an HDMI cable and (for some devices) an HDMI dongle, such as one that converts a USB-C port to HDMI. Once connected, your laptop, phone or tablet screen should be displayed on your TV’s screen. At that point, just fire up your VPN, start your streaming app (or browser) and maximize the window.
Whole-house VPN access: Set up a VPN on your router
All of the methods above describe ways to get VPN streaming access on a single TV. But if you want a whole-house approach – in which you could, for instance, watch UK Netflix on every device on your home network – you’d want to investigate accessing the VPN at the router level. Just note this is for advanced users only, and is far and away the most challenging method of the bunch.
This requires installing a new router, or making major modifications to your existing one. Furthermore, it generally requires installing a custom firmware on a router, which usually means voiding the hardware manufacturer’s warranty. And even then, you’ll need an expert user in the household who knows how to engage and disengage the VPN and customize its settings, as leaving it turned on all the time can interfere with non-streaming activities, including simple things like shopping online.
All that said, a more streamlined whole-home option for ExpressVPN users is to try out that provider’s AirCove router models. (Note that Engadget has not yet tested these models.) Because they are ExpressVPN’s own hardware, they include warranty coverage and support through the company.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/how-to-stream-video-to-your-tv-using-a-vpn-023736315.html?src=rss
Speculative new research outlines a method for detecting extraterrestrial civilizations: by catching the gravitational waves produced by the collapse, or failure, of their warp drives. Sounds wild, but the concept is grounded in the principles of Einstein’s general relativity.
Perplexity, a company that describes its product as “a free AI search engine,” has been under fire over the past few days. Shortly after Forbes accused it of stealing its story and republishing it across multiple platforms, Wired reported that Perplexity has been ignoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol, or robots.txt, and has been scraping its website and other Condé Nast publications. Technology website The Shortcut also accused the company of scraping its articles. Now, Reuters has reported that Perplexity isn’t the only AI company that’s bypassing robots.txt files and scraping websites to get content that’s then used to train their technologies.
Reuters said it saw a letter addressed to publishers from TollBit, a startup that pairs them up with AI firms so they can reach licensing deals, warning them that “AI agents from multiple sources (not just one company) are opting to bypass the robots.txt protocol to retrieve content from sites.” The robots.txt file contains instructions for web crawlers on which pages they can and can’t access. Web developers have been using the protocol since 1994, but compliance is completely voluntary.
TollBit’s letter didn’t name any company, but Business Insider says it has learned that OpenAI and Anthropic — the creators of the ChatGPT and Claude chatbots, respectively — are also bypassing robots.txt signals. Both companies previously proclaimed that they respect “do not crawl” instructions websites put in their robots.txt files.
During its investigation, Wired discovered that a machine on an Amazon server “certainly operated by Perplexity” was bypassing its website’s robots.txt instructions. To confirm whether Perplexity was scraping its content, Wired provided the company’s tool with headlines from its articles or short prompts describing its stories. The tool reportedly came up with results that closely paraphrased its articles “with minimal attribution.” And at times, it even generated inaccurate summaries for its stories — Wired says the chatbot falsely claimed that it reported about a specific California cop committing a crime in one instance.
In an interview with Fast Company, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told the publication that his company “is not ignoring the Robot Exclusions Protocol and then lying about it.” That doesn’t mean, however, that it isn’t benefiting from crawlers that do ignore the protocol. Srinivas explained that the company uses third-party web crawlers on top of its own, and that the crawler Wired identified was one of them. When Fast Company asked if Perplexity told the crawler provider to stop scraping Wired’s website, he only replied that “it’s complicated.”
Srinivas defended his company’s practices, telling the publication that the Robots Exclusion Protocol is “not a legal framework” and suggesting that publishers and companies like his may have to establish a new kind of relationship. He also reportedly insinuated that Wired deliberately used prompts to make Perplexity’s chatbot behave the way it did, so ordinary users will not get the same results. As for the inaccurate summaries that the tool had generated, Srinivas said: “We have never said that we have never hallucinated.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai-companies-are-reportedly-still-scraping-websites-despite-protocols-meant-to-block-them-132308524.html?src=rss
Spotify has a new plan for US subscribers that keeps you on the old $11 monthly pricing — as long as you don’t mind ditching audiobooks. The new Basic tier includes the music and podcast content you get from Premium but without 15 hours of audiobook access, a recently added feature we suspect many subscribers don’t care about anyway. Spotify said earlier this month it would hike Premium prices to $12 per month, beginning in July.
The Basic plan echoes one it rolled out in the UK last month. That one costs £11 per month compared to £12 for Premium with audiobook content.
Some have suspected Spotify’s audiobook push has nefarious motives. Earlier this month, the National Music Publishers’ Association asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the move, going as far as calling the company’s audiobook integration “a scheme to increase profits by deceiving consumers and cheating the music royalty system.” The NMPA complaint claims Spotify will pay about $150 million less in music royalties over the next year because of its audiobook fusion. Spotify told Engadget it did nothing wrong and rejected the accusations.
Spotify has been penny-pinching in other areas. It was reported last year that the company planned to overhaul its royalty model. One alleged part of that plan was to demonetize tracks earning less than five cents per month, pushing out some indie artists without established audiences.
Spotify also laid off around 9,000 employees late last year, citing “the gap between our financial goal state and our current operational costs.”
You can switch to the audiobook-free tier (which is now live) by navigating to your account page, then “Manage your plan” and “Change plan” and picking Basic. If you’re a new subscriber, you can choose the Basic option when signing up.
Update, June 21, 2024, 2:36 PM ET: This story has been updated to note that the ability to sign up for the Basic plan is now live.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/spotifys-basic-plan-returns-to-11-a-month-by-cutting-audiobooks-163804267.html?src=rss
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