Good news this week from the Sun’s far side as the Parker Solar Probe checked in after its speedrun through our star’s corona. Parker became the fastest human-made object ever — aside from the manhole cover, of course — as it fell into the Sun’s gravity well on Christmas Eve to pass within 6.1 million kilometers of the surface, in an attempt to study the extremely dynamic environment of the solar atmosphere. Similar to how manned spacecraft returning to Earth are blacked out from radio communications, the plasma soup Parker flew through meant everything it would do during the pass had to be autonomous, and we wouldn’t know how it went until the probe cleared the high-energy zone. The probe pinged Earth with a quick “I’m OK” message on December 26, and checked in with the Deep Space Network as scheduled on January 1, dumping telemetry data that indicated the spacecraft not only survived its brush with the corona but that every instrument performed as expected during the pass. The scientific data from the instruments won’t be downloaded until the probe is in a little better position, and then Parker will get to do the whole thing again twice more in 2025.
Good news too for Apple users, some of whom stand to get a cool $100 as part of a settlement into allegations that Siri-enabled devices “unintentionally” recorded conversations. The $95 million agreement settles a lawsuit brought by users who were shocked — SHOCKED! — to see ads related to esoteric subjects they had recently discussed, apparently independently of uttering the “Hey, Siri” wake phrase. Apple seems to acknowledge that some recordings were made without the wake word, characterizing them as “unintentional” and disputing the plaintiffs’ claims that the recordings were passed to third parties for targeted advertising. The settlement, which may be certified in February, would award the princely sum of $20 to claimants for each Apple device they owned over a ten-year period, up to five devices total.
In related news, Apple is also getting some attention for apparently opting users into its Enhanced Visual Search system. The feature is intended to make it easier to classify and search your photos based on well-known landmarks or points of interest, so if you take a selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower or Grand Canyon, it’ll recognize those features visually and record the fact. It does so by running your snapshots through a local AI algorithm and then encrypting the portion of the image it thinks contains the landmark. The encrypted portion of the image then goes to the cloud for analysis, apparently without getting decrypted, and the suggested location goes back to your device in encrypted form. It’s possible to turn the feature off, but you have to know it’s there in the first place, which we imagine not a lot of Apple users do. While there’s no sign that this new feature leaks any user data, there are a lot of moving pieces that sure seem ripe for exploitation, given enough time.
Are you as sick of counting the numbers of bridges or traffic lights in potato-vision images or trying to figure out if that one square has a few pixels of the rear-view mirror of a motorcycle to prove you’re human? We sure are, and while we’d love to see CAPTCHAs go the way of the dodo, they’re probably here to stay. So, why not have fun with the concept and play a round of DOOM on nightmare mode to prove your non-robotness? That was Guillermo Rauch’s idea, and we have to say it’s pretty cool. You’ve got to kill three monsters to solve the puzzle, and we found it pretty difficult, in part because we’re more used to the WASD layout than using the arrow keys for player movement. Just watch out if you give it a try with headphones on — it’s pretty loud.
And finally, if you feel like your life is missing in-depth knowledge of the inner workings of a Boeing 777’s auxiliary power unit, we’ve got good news for you. We stumbled across this playlist of excellent animations that shows every nook and cranny of the APU, and how it operates. For the uninitiated, the APU is basically a gas turbine engine that lives in the tail of jetliners and provides electrical and pneumatic power whenever the main engines aren’t running. It sounds simple, but there’s so much engineering packed into the APU and the way it integrates into the aircraft systems. We’ve always known that jets have a lot of redundancy built into them, but this series really brought that home to us. Enjoy!
And finally finally, we generally don’t like to plug the Hack Chat here in this space, but we thought we’d make an exception since we’re kicking off the 2025 series in a big way with Eben Upton! The co-founder and CEO of Raspberry Pi will stop by the Hack Chat on January 15 at noon Pacific time, and we just want to get the word out as soon as possible. Hope to see you there!