We all know we live in a surveillance state that would make Orwell shake his head, but it looks like at least one company has been a little rough around the edges. According to reportsAI surveillance start-up Flock<இலவசமாக “வாட் தி ஃப்ளாக்?” என்று செருகவும். joke here>> South Carolina alone has installed at least 200 car surveillance cameras on public roads. That's a bad thing, especially since it's illegal to install anything on state infrastructure without a permit, and it seems Flock failed to get it. South Carolina officials are outraged about this, but it rings hollow to us, especially since Flock now claims 70% of the population (of America, we assume) is covered by their technology. Also, police departments across the country love Flock's service, which helps them accurately track the movements of suspects, and of course it's for everyone. There's no word on whether Phlox will ditch the rogue cameras, but we're not holding our breath.
It looks like we'll soon be writing the obituary we hoped would be a year or two away, and NASA could. Re-establishing meaningful communication Voyager 1 It seems to be decreasing day by day. We reported on the latest „flipped bit glitch” in February, but the problem dates back to November. Voyager 1 Instead the usual payload of scientific data and spacecraft telemetry began to be sent back as nonsense. The outage is thought to be caused by corrupted memory in the flight data system; NASA planned to solve this by ordering a switch to a mode last used when NASA made its planetary missions decades ago, but it's unclear if they ever did this or what the results were. Let the silence speak for itself. We know the entire Voyager program is past diminishing returns, and the money NASA is spending on half-century-old hardware 24 billion kilometers away to produce results could be better spent elsewhere. But then again, as we expand humanity's footprint further into the galaxy, having something far away to communicate with seems like a great way to develop the skills we need, so it's worth the cost. A thought.
Also in space news but a little closer to home, a fatal wound Intelligence The helicopter can no longer fly, but It still has work to do. Unlike Another recent lander spacecraft, Intelligence It managed to land on its feet after crashing into Mars, exposing its solar panel to the Sun and turning it on. That's good news; The bad news is that the only thing it can do now is use its downward-facing navigation cameras to pick up particles of sand and dust in the air. It's valuable geological work, no doubt, but compared to soaring through the thin Martian atmosphere and breaking record after record, it seems like a somewhat ignoble respite. Lemonade from lemons, anyone?
No one said it was easy being a Linux geek, but those of us who have willingly destroyed or defaced their computers can tell you, it's not always an easy line. This is especially true in content creation; While the Mac and Windows crowd can (usually) plug and play, getting a Linux machine to cooperate with audio and video editing hardware and software can be a bit of a pain. Fortunately, we have Ven Stone's Interfacing Linux Help us. Wen has spent the past decade building a Linux-based AV production studio and now shares tips and tricks learned along the way, as well as building a community of like-minded content creators. If you refuse to worship at the altar of Redmond or Cupertino, this might be the place for you.
Finally, last week (item five) we mentioned the news that the US government is pushing programmers to avoid programming languages it deems „memory unsafe.” It basically boils down to „C/C++ is bad” because they lead to buffer overflow errors that can be exploited by malware. Now, the US National Security Agency — yes, N.S.A – has come out with A useful list of alternate languages, it has excellent memory-protection features and is completely uncompromised in any way. Rust fans will no doubt be delighted, as will Java programmers. We were a little surprised to see C# on the list, but we expect the inclusion of Ruby and Python to raise a few eyebrows, the latter no doubt drawing the ire of a certain Hackaday editor.