There are about half a dozen small companies working on this but apparently the government is more interested in spending money on a company with zero experience with earth imaging. Dunno how I feel about the USG just putting all their eggs in Elon’s batshit insane basket
My guess is the optics themselves don’t need to be very mind blowing anymore. If this is a constellation, you will basically have the ability to combine many lesser quality images into higher res versions for review, and in near realtime, and from many different angles. Slap some AI upscaling magic in there, some object tracking and things like gait and attribute recognition, and you have something fairly close to ‘Enemy of the State’ capabilities, minus all the BS zooming and looking through walls.
It’s not necessarily imaging as in optics. Could be OPIR, encrypted comms, space to space ASAT, or any number of other things besides just earth imaging.
I assume the hard part here is the deployment of thousands of low orbit satellites at a rapid rate, not the imaging. The government surely already has the imaging tech, it’s getting a swarm of satellites up there what’s no other company has proven able to do.
This would be a great idea for wheelchair users, since I imagine being in a crowd of people at waist level detracts a bit from the experience you’d get by walking. But if everyone is able to use these chairs, it’ll just cause more congestion.
*Over the past few years, lawmakers have sought to address the data broker problem, proposing bills that would limit the collection of location and health data and regulate the government’s purchases of data from third parties. Our resource highlights two legislative proposals that would constrain the government’s ability to acquire large swaths of personal information without legal process.
The first, the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, takes an important step toward closing the data broker loophole and updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The bill would bar law enforcement and intelligence agencies from purchasing certain communications-related information and location data.
But it could be stronger. The bill is still tied to outdated categories of communications service providers from the 1980s, and it would not cover similar information collected and sold by other companies, such as health and fitness apps. It also would not cover other categories of sensitive personal information like health, financial, or biometric information. Nor would it address the overcollection of data, or the trafficking of personal information to private entities or even foreign governments, practices that will likely intensify with the proliferation of AI models reliant on vast data sets.
The American Data Privacy and Protection Act takes a different approach. It is a comprehensive federal consumer privacy bill that promises to reduce the amount of personal information flowing into and out of the hands of data brokers. It would do this by restricting the collection of such information to only what is necessary to provide a service or achieve certain purposes specified in the bill and by placing additional limits on data transfers. This legislation is a promising template, but it, too, should be strengthened.
The bill has multiple exceptions that would allow government agencies to obtain a significant amount of personal data. These exceptions should be narrowed to prohibit transfers of data to law enforcement or intelligence agencies absent clear indications of a threat to public safety, a security incident, fraud, harassment, or illegal activity, or unless the government has followed the legal process required for compelled disclosure.
These bills, with the modifications we suggest, point the way forward. The data broker loophole is growing wider by the day, and it threatens to swallow the privacy protections provided in statutes and even in the Constitution. Congress must intervene to bring the law in line with the modern world and end the government’s all-too-common practice of buying its way around our privacy rights.*
unless the government has followed the legal process required for compelled disclosure.
I don’t see why we can’t just say that for everything. If the government wants the data, they can get a warrant. It’s not that hard - don’t we regularly complain warrants are too rubber stamped?
It’s a private company. It’s their prerogative what they do either way. That said, the man child Elon was crowing about free speech with regards to Twitter. There’s no double standards or hypocrisy here. Elon is just hoisting that petard to own himself again. As usual.
This is our future isn’t it? This is it. Spending our days wondering if we’re going to be mown down by a clumsy Johnnycab because it was fractionally cheaper than paying somebody to drive.
Fr, I’d still trust a self driving vehicle over a human driver any day of the week.
Humans are terrible drivers, this could have easily been just another person driving distracted or something and then we wouldn’t even know about it because it wouldn’t be news worthy.
I am from the US, my wife is not. I live in her country and Disney releases a different app for each country.
This is a problem, because I have the US app store and she has the app store from her country. So, I cannot log into our disneyplus account on my phone. Or I can get the app and subscribe then, she can’t login.
I’d switch my account to the country where we are living, but I can’t or I’d lose access to some of my banking apps. So, I don’t even have a way to watch it without getting two subscriptions.
For people out of the loop what is this about? Is a new whatsapp clone being released? I read something about apple blocking something but don’t understand what’s going on.
I agree with the other commenter in general but I’ll give you the bullet points.
Old news:
iMessage is a proprietary chat protocol that only works on Apple devices. Apple has indicated multiple times they have zero intention of porting this to other platforms
Apple users texting each other default to iMessage
iMessage has a lot of useful features over SMS texting that are highly desirable and convenient
On iPhones, when iMessages are being successfully sent in a text, the chat bubbles are blue. If they are SMS, they are green
The US additionally has a weird culture of some iPhone users shaming Android users because of the inability to communicate via iMessage, often referred to by the green/blue bubble appearance
There have been a few attempts to circumvent this, mostly by having a Mac somewhere with software installed to it that forwards iMessages to your Android device, though this is extremely cumbersome as it requires having an entire computer on 24/7 to make sure you receive these messages
New news:
Beeper Mini was released earlier this week, which actually runs a reverse-engineered iMessage client that tricks Apple servers into treating it like an Apple device
It was fully functional for about one day with almost all iMessage features working
Apple made some variety of change on their end that broke Beeper Mini functionality
And that’s about it. For those of us that would like to have easy communication with our iPhone-using friends and family, yet don’t want to change phone ecosystems to do so, this is a problem that would be awesome to see solved.
There are folks that, either because of ignorance or pigheadedness, like to chime in on these threads that they don’t care about having blue bubbles. That is the least important aspect of this to most people following this, for the reasons I mentioned above.
Thanks. That helps a lot. I never knew that iMessages was integrated with sms, just thought it existed as a internet protocol like many other proprietary ones.
Basically it’s all the same usual problem of using a closed proprietary chat protocol that a single stake holder has the power to change however and whenever they want.
Like whatsap, facebook and others which any alternative has to keep catching up to the changes that the companies do and which is very hard to maintain the reverse engineered protocols.
It never crossed my mind that I don’t usually see alternative clients for imessage, but makes sense, didn’t think it would be so hard to do.
So these guys came up with a implementation that works and apple just wants to crush them to destroy any alternatives. Business as usual.
It’s hard to understand these news when all the lingo used implies you already know the thing being talked about. An article talking about “Blue bubbles” makes no sense whatsoever to anyone not used to apple ecosystem.
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