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NASA is going back to an old idea as it tries to get humans to Mars. It is teaming up with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to test a nuclear thermal rocket engine in space with the aim of using the technology for crewed missions to the red planet. The agencies hope to “demonstrate advanced nuclear thermal propulsion technology as soon as 2027,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said. “With the help of this new technology, astronauts could journey to and from deep space faster than ever — a major capability to prepare for crewed missions to Mars.”

Under the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program, NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate will take the lead on technical development of the engine, which will be integrated with an experimental spacecraft from DARPA. NASA says that nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) could allow spacecraft to travel faster, which could reduce the volume of supplies needed to carry out a long mission. An NTD engine could also free up space for more science equipment and extra power for instrumentation and communication.

As far back as the 1940s, scientists started speculating about the possibility of using nuclear energy to power spaceflight. The US conducted ground experiments on that front starting in the ’50s. Budget cutbacks and changing priorities (such as a focus on the Space Shuttle program) led to NASA abandoning the project at the end of 1972 before it carried out any test flights.

There are, of course, risks involved with NTP engines, such as the possible dispersal of radioactive material in the environment should a failure occur in the atmosphere or orbit. Nevertheless, NASA says the faster transit times that NTP engines can enable could lower the risk to astronauts — they could reduce travel times to Mars by up to a quarter. Nuclear thermal rockets could be at least three times more efficient than conventional chemical propulsion methods.

NASA is also looking into nuclear energy to power related space exploration efforts. In 2018, it carried out tests of a portable nuclear reactor as part of efforts to develop a system capable of powering a habitat on Mars. Last year, NASA and the Department of Energy selected three contractors to design a fission surface power system that it can test on the Moon. DARPA and the Defense Department have worked on other NTP engine projects over the last few years.

Meanwhile, the US has just approved a small modular nuclear design for the first time. As Gizmodo reports, the design allows for a nuclear facility that’s around a third the size of a standard reactor. Each module is capable of producing around 50 megawatts of power. The design, from a company called NuScale, could lower the cost and complexity of building nuclear power plants.

 

One Activision Blizzard studio won’t form a union, at least not in the near future. The Communication Workers of America (CWA) says it’s withdrawing its petition for a union vote at Blizzard support studio Proletariat, which is currently working on World of Warcraft: Dragonflight. As Kotakunotes, a CWA spokesperson claims Proletariat chief Seth Sivak saw employees’ unionization move as a “personal attack” and held meetings that allegedly “demoralized and disempowered” the team enough to prevent a fair election.

The pro-union group, the Proletariat Workers Alliance, said in December that it had majority support. Activision Blizzard declined to willingly recognize the union, though, forcing an election through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). It’s not clear how much support the vote has now, but Proletariat engineer Dustin Yost says in a statement that the union-busting meetings “took their toll.”

We’ve asked Activision Blizzard and the CWA for comment. There are no immediate indications the CWA plans to resubmit the petition or file a complaint with the NLRB over the alleged anti-union tactics. Yost says he still feels a union is the “best way” to get industry representation.

Staff at Activision Blizzard’s Albany studio and Raven Software successfully unionized last year despite accusations of anti-union tactics from the publisher. However, those campaigns were limited to quality assurance testers. Proletariat Workers Alliance hoped to unite the entire studio except for management, which was considerably more complex. According to an Axiossource, some teammates felt the unionization push was too quick and didn’t give them the time to understand the consequences.

This doesn’t rule out a union at Proletariat or other Activision Blizzard teams. With that said, it comes as workers across the tech space seek to unionize, including at gaming giants like Microsoft’s ZeniMax. Developers and testers don’t feel they’re getting fair working conditions, and they’re increasingly willing to speak out on the subject.

 

Lyft has quietly started charging late fees to customers who make their drivers wait for them. In a recently published support document, the company outlines a policy that will see it add wait time fees to trips where drivers arrive at a pickup location and wait for more than two minutes for a passenger to get into their car.

The fees won’t apply to Shared, Access, Assisted and Car Seat rides, and if a driver cancels on you due to a no-show, you won’t need to pay a wait time penalty on top of a cancellation fee. Additionally, Lyft offers a five-minute grace period for Lux Black and Lux Black XL rides. And if a driver arrives early, the clock won’t start ticking until after the original estimated pickup time.

“Wait time fees help keep our platform running smoothly – try to be on time and ready to meet your driver when they arrive at the pickup location,” the company says. “Additional wait time charges may apply to your trip depending on how busy it is. Wait time fees vary by location.”

Users with disabilities or those who frequently accompany people who may need more time to board a car can request a waiver from the fees from Lyft. The company says those customers can also request refunds for wait fees they may have incurred in the past.

The change aligns Lyft with Uber’s wait time policy, which the latter has had in place since 2016. Notably, those include the terms designed to accommodate riders with disabilities. Last year, Uber settled with the US Department of Justice after the agency accused the company of overcharging passengers with disabilities.

 

Like many big tech companies, Microsoft is preparing for the worst after announcing plans to lay off 10,000 employees in the upcoming third quarter. It turns out that the company’s second quarter was a mixed bag: It earned $52.7 billion in revenue, which was up 2 percent from last year, but a slight miss from the $52.9 billion analysts expected. Profits also fell by 12 percent to $16.4 billion, a trend that may continue throughout the year.

Despite the faltering PC market, Microsoft has been riding high on cloud revenues for years, and that seems to be continuing. its intelligent cloud business was up 18 percent from last year, reaching $21.5 billion. Microsoft’s belt tightening didn’t stop the company from potentially investing $10 billion more in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, yet another sign that AI is going to play a major role in its future projects. The company plans to add ChatGPT to its Azure OpenAI service soon, and it’s reportedly planning to integrated that technology in Bing.

Developing…

 

Alongside eight states, the US Department of Justice is suing Google to break up the company’s advertising business. In a complaint filed Tuesday with a federal court in Virginia, the agency accused Google of illegally monopolizing the digital advertising market. “Google’s anticompetitive behavior has raised barriers to entry to artificially high levels, forced key competitors to abandon the market for ad tech tools, dissuaded potential competitors from joining the market, and left Google’s few remaining competitors marginalized and unfairly disadvantaged,” the Justice Department alleges.

“Today’s lawsuit from the DOJ attempts to pick winners and losers in the highly competitive advertising technology sector,” a Google spokesperson told Engadget. “It largely duplicates an unfounded lawsuit by the Texas Attorney General, much of which was recently dismissed by a federal court. DOJ is doubling down on a flawed argument that would slow innovation, raise advertising fees, and make it harder for thousands of small businesses and publishers to grow.”

As Bloomberg notes, the lawsuit represents the Biden administration’s first significant attempt to challenge the power of one of the nation’s largest tech firms. The agency previously sued Google in 2020. At the time, the Justice Department, under Attorney General William Barr, said the company had a monopoly over search and search-related advertising. It also took issue with the terms around Android, which the Justice Department said unfairly advantage Google by forcing manufacturers to preload their devices with the company’s applications and search engine.

Google faces intense government scrutiny over its hold on the digital advertising market. In 2020, Texas filed a multi-state lawsuit accusing the company of using its “monopolistic power to control” ad pricing. One year later, the European Commission opened a probe into the company’s advertising business, a move that seems to have forced Google to reconsider how it handles ads on YouTube. Last year, the Senate also introduced legislation designed to prevent companies like Google from participating in more than one part of the digital advertising ecosystem.

“Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” the Justice Department says in its most recent complaint. It accuses Google of using acquisitions to take out both “actual or potential” competitors, in addition to abusing its marketplace dominance to prevent publishers and advertisers from using competing products effectively. “Whenever Google’s customers and competitors responded with innovation that threatened Google’s stranglehold over any one of these ad tech tools, Google’s anticompetitive response has been swift and effective,” the Justice Department alleges.

One estimate suggests Google controls as much as 26.5 percent of the US digital ads market. The company’s ad unit is expected to generate about $73.8 billion in US ad revenue over the next year, with much of that money coming from search advertisements.

 

A new exploit in the PC version of Grand Theft Auto Online is causing players to lose game progress and in-game currency, with some accounts becoming corrupted or banned. The exploit, a “remote code execution,” was distributed through the developer of the North Online GTA cheat mod.

The exploit can reportedly impact anyone, not just players in the same multiplayer lobby as the attacker, according toBleepingComputer. That means anyone currently online and playing the game on PC is at least theoretically vulnerable to attack. (Console players are unaffected.) Engadget reached out to Rockstar for comment, and we will update this article if we hear back.

The company tweeted this acknowledgment of the fiasco on Monday.

North’s developer removed the abusive elements on January 21st and apologized (their changelog read “bad judgement on my part for adding this public.”) Although GTA Online doesn’t block harmless community-created mods, those distributing cheats or other hacks tilting the game’s competitive balance may face real-world consequences. Rockstar and parent company Take-Two Interactive have previously taken legal action against cheat makers, including the creator of an infinite-money hack who was ordered to pay $150,000 plus attorney fees in 2019.

A workaround for corrupted accounts, which some players have claimed works, is to delete the “Rockstar Games” folder from the Windows Documents folder before reloading the game. However, we recommend avoiding the PC version until Rockstar cleans things up.

 

Apple‘s latest 12.9-inch iPad Pro has dropped to its lowest price to date across several configurations. The 512GB version of the tablet, which is powered by an M2 chipset, is $100 off at $1,299. If you’d like to double that storage to 1TB, you’ll save $200 off the regular price, as that version has dropped to $1,599. Similarly, a 12.9-inch iPad Pro M2 with 2TB of storage is $200 off at $1,999. These prices are for the WiFi models, but you can also snag the 1TB and 2TB cellular variants for $200 off the regular price. Amazon isn’t offering a discount on the 512GB WiFi and cellular version at the minute, unfortunately.

The M2 lineup offers significant CPU and GPU performance boosts over the M1 iPad Pro, based on our testing. The latest generation of Apple chipsets power some neat features on the most recent iPad Pro models, including an Apple Pencil tool called Hover. This allows you to see how apps and other aspects of the user interface will react before you touch the stylus against the tablet. For instance, you may be able to see how colors will blend with each other in watercolor apps before applying the brushstroke. The tablet can also now record video in Apple’s ProRes codec in 4K resolution at 30 frames per second.

All told, we gave the latest iPad Pro a score of 87 in our review. The chip upgrade is a big selling point, especially if you already have an iPad Pro that’s a few years old and showing its age. Add in a best-in-class screen and design, as well as great battery life, and the M2-powered 12.9-inch iPad Pro may just be worth your while.

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SpaceX’s next-generation Starship super heavy-lift rocket is one step closer to the day when it may finally fly. On Monday, SpaceX fueled a fully stacked Starship for the first time. The “wet dress rehearsal” saw the company load the vehicle’s Super Heavy and Starship stages with more than 10 million pounds of liquid oxygen and methane fuel. Additionally, SpaceX ran through some of the countdown procedures it will need to complete on launch day. “Today’s test will help verify a full launch countdown sequence, as well as the performance of Starship and the orbital pad for flight-light operations,” SpaceX posted on Twitter.

As Space.com notes, Monday’s test means SpaceX is on track to complete an orbital flight of Starship sometime in the coming months. The company filed the necessary paperwork for that test in May 2021, following its first successful landing of a Starship prototype. Since then, the Starship program has encountered a handful of setbacks. For instance, a lengthy review saw the Federal Aviation Administration order SpaceX to take more than 75 actions to mitigate the impact of Starship launches on the environment surrounding the company’s Boca Chica site in Texas. More recently, a booster test fire ended with a fiery explosion. Following this week’s wet dress rehearsal, SpaceX must complete a few more on-the-ground tests before Starship can fly. One of the more critical trials will require the company to simultaneously fire all of the Super Heavy booster’s 33 Raptor engines.

 

The next version of Android could bar you from installing ancient apps in some circumstances. 9to5Google has spotted a code change indicating that Android 14 will block users from sideloading apps (that is, installing them outside of the Play Store) that don’t target a minimum version of the operating system. It will stop the installation of particularly old software at first, but Google expects to “progressively” raise the bar to require at least Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

The move is meant to boost security and privacy. Malware writers can’t just target old versions of Android to escape security measures in newer releases, Google says. Google already requires that apps in the Play Store target at least Android 12. This update denies attempts to install vintage apps through the web or third-party stores.

This won’t completely thwart you if there’s a classic app you’re determined to run. It’s up to device manufacturers to enable the cutoff, and there will still be a way to install apps through a command shell. The new policy is meant to stop people from unwittingly installing malware. If you sideload an old app on an Android 14 phone with this measure switched on, you likely know exactly what you’re doing.

Still, it’s notable that Google is limiting sideloading at all. For some, it’s a reason to buy an Android phone instead of an iPhone — you’re free to install apps that aren’t available in the official store. However, it’s not surprising that Google is clamping down. Android malware writers frequently (though not always) rely on sideloading precisely because there are fewer restrictions than in the Play Store. A block on old apps won’t put an end to malware, but it could tighten the platform’s overall security.

 

Google doesn’t plan to let political campaigns dodge Gmail’s spam detection for much longer. The Washington Post has learned that Google plans to end the email filter bypass pilot program by the end of this month. In a dismissal motion filed at a federal court in the Eastern District of California, the company rejects the Republican National Committee (RNC) allegations of political bias that led to the test. Gmail’s filtering methods “apply equally” to every sender whether or not there’s a political connection, the company says.

The pilot was a response to RNC accusations in October that Google was censoring right-wing fundraising emails by marking them as spam. The committee pointed to a study that supposedly backed the claims, but Google maintained that messaging frequency, user responses and other non-political elements dictated filtering behavior. Even so, Google acknowledged the pressure and got permission from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to run the test. The experiment was already set to end in January, but it wasn’t clear if Google would extend the program until now.

Over 100 Democrat and Republican committees joined the program after it was approved in August. However, the RNC wasn’t one of them. Google points this out in its new filing, asserting that the Republicans want to accuse the firm of unfair treatment instead of participating in the solution.

In a statement to Engadget, Google spokesperson José Castañeda says a recent FEC decision “confirmed” it doesn’t filter email for “political purposes.” The representative also maintains that the RNC complaint is “without merit.”

On top of the company’s own objections, numerous advocacy groups and other critics urged the FEC to reject the looser approach to political emails. They were concerned this change would let political candidates from any party spam users with few repercussions. With this latest filing, the debate is moot — politicians will have to take a careful approach if they expect campaign messages to go directly to your inbox.