Self-driving planes. Privacy tips for the semester ahead. Pandas going nuts.
| | | | | | | | | Welcome to the Mozilla News Beat, a glance at the best and worst internet news of the week. We hope you enjoy it! |
| Panda-monium. The one video you need to watch this week. An embarrassment of pandas (What? That's what a group of pandas are called!) does everything in its power to stop a zookeeper from raking leaves. Madness ensues. | via Twitter | | | Flying High. Would you ride in an autonomous plane? A writer for WIRED did and lived to tell the tale. The company Xwing is developing planes that can self-pilot, with the hard stuff done by remote control operators. Check out this video, if only to watch a plane land itself. | via Wired | | | Deepfake-Out You can catch the NBA's Damian Lillard in Hulu's newest ad, except not. Hulu made a deepfake, capturing Lillard's face remotely via Zoom and superimposing it over a body double — letting Dame Dolla be in two places at once. Now that's deep. | via Protocol | | Straight Up Fax. Soccer star Lionel Messi shook the world Tuesday when he announced his departure from FC Barcelona. How did he deliver this news to his club? Not over phone or email, but via fax machine — after wiping off an inch of dust and cobwebs. | via BBC | | Learning Privacy. Remote learning is about to be more popular than ever. The New York Times offers up some tips for parents with children who will be learning via their laptops this semester. | via NY Times | | Big Brother Is Confusing You. It's not just you — even Google workers can't tell when the big G is gathering information about them. Documents from a lawsuit against Google have been unsealed, revealing even Google employees don't understand when their location data is being collected. | via Ars Technica | | Amazon vs. Etsy. A new consumer protection bill wants Amazon to operate under added liability rules. In a jujitsu move by Amazon, the company says if they have to, so should their competition. Sites like Etsy are pushing back, noting only Amazon can afford the brunt of this. | via CNBC | | Expecting No Privacy. A new report found that Premom, a pregnancy app that helps women monitor their cycles, shared data with three analytics firms based in China. Android users had their device identifiers shared along with activity across apps and sites without their knowledge. | via The Verge | | Ad Nauseam. Facebook continues to engage in discriminatory ad practices. The Markup found job ads on the platform that specifically weeded out people older than 54 or targeted people of "African American multicultural affinity" — which is illegal. | via The Markup | | Covid-19 x 2. Coronavirus immunity may wear off. Hong Kong researchers have discovered the world's first case of Covid-19 reinfection. A man in his 30s, who tested positive for coronavirus 142 days prior, was infected again. | via MIT Technology Review | | Hurricane Laura. Classified as "unsurvivable," Thursday's Hurricane Laura storm is one of the most destructive to ever hit the U.S. Astronaut Chris Cassidy captured rare footage of the violent storm from high above, on the International Space Station. | via Insider | | Too Little, Too Late. Two were killed in Wisconsin Tuesday during a protest for Jacob Blake — a Black man who was shot in the back by police. The murders are suspected to be tied to a Facebook event post that was reshared by InfoWars. Facebook didn't remove the post until Wednesday. | via Business Insider |
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