Science, Technology, and Social Media

Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., (March 26, 2020) – A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket carrying the sixth Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) communications satellite for the U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center lifted off from Space Launch Complex-41 on March 26 at 4:18 p.m. EDT. This marks the 83rd successful launch of an Atlas ...

Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., (March 24, 2020) – A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket is in final preparations to launch the sixth Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) communications satellite for the U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center. The launch is on track for March 26 at Space Launch Complex-41 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. ...

GOP South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s EARN IT Act is a bipartisan effort to protect children online. But tech experts said the act would violate Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and has the ability to “end the internet as we know it.” “The EARN IT Act could actually make law enforcement’s job significantly harder by ending today’s close ...

It is new, but not entirely. The coronavirus upending the world right now is so similar to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus of 2002–03 that virologists opted to simply call it SARS-CoV-2. Yet there seem to be some crucial differences between the virus that caused an epidemic 17 years ago and the one causing a global pandemic today. ...

Facebook said Tuesday a bug in the company’s anti-spam system that is randomly and mistakenly flagging user content is unrelated to any changes in the workforce due to coronavirus. Twitter users tweeted images of a warning they received from Facebook suggesting their content violated company policies against spam. The content was flagged due to a bug rather than a lack ...

Twitter said Monday night that social-distancing policies might require the social media company to rely heavily on artificial intelligence to regulate user content. “To support social distancing and working from home, we need to work differently and rely more on automated systems to help enforce our rules,” Twitter wrote in a tweet addressing how the company is preparing to address ...

Twitter removed tweets from Sheriff David Clarke that mention coronavirus, yet the company has still not taken action against a Chinese official’s tweet suggesting the US is behind the virus outbreak. Clarke posted three tweets that have since been nuked, one encouraging people to “get back to reasonableness” and “stop buying toilet paper,” while another appeared to compare coronavirus to ...

The head of a Google-funded think tank is resigning after suggesting to his Twitter followers that he would like to see President Donald Trump die from coronavirus, Politico reported Friday. TechFreedom president Berin Szóka is going on an indefinite sabbatical to write a book on tech policy, the libertarian-leaning group told Politico. Szóka got into some hot water Monday after ...

A Chinese official’s tweets suggesting the U.S. army is responsible for injecting coronavirus into Wuhan, China will not be removed, a Twitter spokesman told the Daily Caller News Foundation. A tweet from Chinese politician Lijian Zhao suggesting the United States is trying to keep secret a plan to inject the virus into China “does not violate the Twitter Rules,” a ...

Google, Facebook, and other tech companies met with members of the Trump administration Wednesday with the purpose of hammering out a strategy to confront the coronavirus outbreak. Microsoft, IBM, and Facebook had a phone-to-video meeting with top officials in the Office of Science and Technology Policy regarding ways artificial intelligence can help medical researchers develop a vaccine. They also discussed ...

The Democratic Party asked Twitter to do something about a heavily edited video the Trump reelection campaign produced of former Vice President Joe Biden, The Daily Beast reported Tuesday. The Democratic National Committee flagged the video on behalf of the former vice president, whose campaign is using members of the press to act as fact-checkers, the report noted, citing DNC ...

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign pushed back Monday against Twitter’s decision to call out the team for deceptively editing a video of former Vice President Joe Biden. White House social media director Dan Scavino thrashed Twitter early Monday morning for labelling the video an example of “manipulated media.” Scavino and Trump’s digital director, Gary Coby, criticized the platform while tech ...

Dragon arrived at the International Space Station on March 9, 2020 and was captured at 3:25 a.m. PDT while flying over 262 statute miles over the Pacific Northwest. The spacecraft was then installed on the Harmony module for the duration of its four-week stay at the orbiting laboratory. Filled with approximately 4,500 pounds of supplies and payloads, Dragon launched aboard ...

Tech investment firm Sequoia Capital told top Silicon Valley executives Thursday that the coronavirus could create opportunities for companies capable of weathering a potential economic downturn. Major CEOs should “question every assumption” they have about their business models, Sequoia wrote in a memo addressing what companies should do in the event that the virus becomes a global economic problem. The ...

People inside Apple raised concerns about the company’s dependency on China well before the coronavirus outbreak, but higher-ups pushed back against such warnings, saying a clean break from Beijing is impossible. Operation executives argued in 2015 that the company should switch some forms of production to Vietnam, The Walls Street Journal noted in a report Tuesday. Such a move would ...