Ever since its launch in 2010, as reported by The New York Post, Instagram has forbidden any child under the age of 13 from using the app. But now, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, which bought the social media platform in 2012, is reportedly developing an Instagram 2.0 app that specifically targets kids under that age threshold. //

“But don’t worry, folks, the new Insta will be run by parents. Considering the average parent is exhausted and overworked, claiming they have just 32 minutes to themselves every day, the idea that this new app will be continuously monitored by moms and dads is laughable.

“Furthermore, underage children are already getting onto social media without their parents’ consent. Today, the majority of young children own a cellphone by the age of 7, and most children develop habits by the age of 9 — and the results are sometimes disastrous. //

Instagram has proved to be even worse when it comes to young kids, Ghlionn said, noting that “Insta” — as Instagram groupies like to call it — is the most popular site for child predators. The following is disgusting, gang. (emphasis, mine)

“Instagram’s plans to recruit a younger audience is especially worrying, considering it is one of the most popular sites for child predators. In 2019, an international group of human rights NGOs called Instagram a ‘predator’s paradise.’

“According to one report, members of the group ‘compiled an alarming dossier of grooming-style behaviors on the popular social media platform.’

“The researchers “discovered hundreds of predatory comments from men describing sexual acts they wanted to perform on underage girls, some as young as 7.” //

“When we think of evil, we tend to think of men in balaclavas, armed with weapons, moving quietly through the dead of night.

“However, some of the worst ideas are in plain sight, and some of the worst people are in positions of power. They lobby politicians and play major roles in drafting legislation.

“This is the banality of evil in its purest form, and Mark Zuckerberg is its poster boy.”

In three months, NASA will come upon the 10th anniversary of the final space shuttle flight, a period that was surely melancholy for the space agency.

When the big, white, winged vehicles touched down for the final time in July 2011, NASA surrendered its ability to get humans into space. It had to rely on Russia for access to the International Space Station. And the space agency had to fight the public perception that NASA was somehow a fading force, heading into the sunset.

Now we know that will not be the case, and the future appears bright for the space agency and its international partners. On Friday morning, NASA and SpaceX launched the third mission of Crew Dragon that has carried astronauts into space. After nearly a decade with no human orbital launches from the United States, there have been three in less than 11 months. Another successful mission further confirmed that the combination of Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft is a reliable means of getting crews to the International Space Station. //

The "team" is a collaboration between engineers at NASA and SpaceX that have worked to develop and certify the Crew Dragon system for human spaceflight for a fixed price of about $55 million per seat. Since 2017, NASA had been paying Russia more than $80 million for an astronaut to ride into orbit.

The partnership has also been very good for SpaceX, which has sought to develop rapid, low-cost access to space through reusable vehicles. Thanks to NASA's flexibility, SpaceX launched Monday's mission on a Falcon 9 rocket that flew in November and on a Crew Dragon vehicle, Endeavour, that first went into space last May. //

With the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon, SpaceX has gotten mostly there. However, the Falcon 9 rocket's upper stage is expended after a launch, and the Dragon capsules undergo significant refurbishment between flights. Musk sees this launch system as an interim stage to full reuse, and SpaceX is still learning lessons. The company has already flown one of its Falcon 9 first stages nine times and will soon fly it a tenth time. The plan is to push the limits of the Falcon 9 with the company's own Starlink missions, Musk said.

"There doesn’t seem to be any obvious limits to the reusability of the vehicle," he said. "We intend to fly the Falcon 9 rocket until we see some kind of failure."

These lessons will be incorporated into SpaceX's next-generation Starship and Super Heavy launch system, which is designed to be fully reusable and able to launch again within days of landing. That's the aspirational goal, at least. NASA seems intrigued, as it recently selected Starship to land its astronauts on the Moon later this decade as part of the Artemis Program.

A well-known Ohio pilot and aviation columnist may be the first to run afoul of a new regulation triggered by the ADS-B mandate enacted in 2020. Martha Lunken, 78, who pens a popular column in Flying Magazine and is a fixture in Midwest aviation, flew under a bridge near her home airport, which bears her name, in southern Ohio in March of 2020, an impulsive and “immature” stunt she told AVweb she knew was wrong. But a coincidental malfunction of her Cessna 180’s transponder with ADS-B-Out may have resulted in her being slapped with an emergency revocation of all her certificates instead of the suspension that normally accompanies such transgressions. //

Lunken, who has spent 60 years flying in that area, said that if she was trying to prevent Big Brother from watching her do something, there are myriad easier and virtually undetectable ways to do it. //

As for the stunt itself, which has been the focus of most of the social media attention and reaction, Lunken said it was just a silly spur-of-the-moment thing. “I looked over my left shoulder and I saw the bridge and I thought ‘I just have to fly under that bridge before I get old.’” The Jeremiah Morrow Bridge is 239 feet above the Little Miami River Gorge and Lunken said she didn’t have to draw very heavily on her 18,000 hours of experience to get to the other side. “It certainly didn’t take any skill,” she said. As for it being a reflection of her attitude toward safety and the regs, she said nothing could be further from the truth. “It is not part of a pattern of behavior and I am not an irresponsible pilot,” she said. “I would never have put anyone in danger.”

A security camera snapped a picture of her passage and the FAA sent her a letter a few weeks later saying they were investigating. //

FAA enforcement guidelines call for a period of suspension of 30 days to four months for the bridge stunt, which is a violation of altitude and distance-from-objects regs. “I knew it was illegal and I did it anyway,” she said. “I’m 78 and I’m still not very mature and I hope I never am.” When she didn’t hear anything after six months, she thought the FAA had dropped the matter. The emergency revocation letter was delivered March 19.

Lunken said she’s considered appealing the revocation but her lawyers estimated the cost at $25,000. Instead, she’s spending her time watching from the ground while others fly and hitting the books to reclaim her private pilot certificate. Revocation cancels all certificates and ratings (she was an ATP) and she has to start over to get back in the air. So far, it’s been an eye-opener as she studies for the written. “A lot has changed in 60 years,” she said. Normally, a revocation prevents the guilty party from taking flight training for a year but her legal team negotiated a three-month reduction. “I’ll be a student pilot in December.”

TechFreedom, a libertarian-leaning think tank that filed a brief in the case, said the Supreme Court ruling "restores due process at the FTC." TechFreedom President Berin Szóka wrote:

The text of the Act is clear: Section 13(b) allows the agency to stop deceitful or fraudulent conduct quickly, so that the conduct is not ongoing while the agency then completes a more rigorous process for clawing back ill-gotten gains. This process ensures a balance: fraudsters' misconduct is promptly shut down, but the agency is forced to prove that its target is indeed engaged in fraud before taking money from it. Although the agency (and several Senators) have recently emphasized how important the agency's Section 13(b) authority is for obtaining consumer redress, it is only important because the agency has made it so, by convincing courts to let the agency misuse it for that purpose.

Public Knowledge said the ruling "decimates [the] FTC's ability to protect consumers through restitution" but pointed out that Congress can restore the FTC's powers by amending the law. //

As Justice [Stephen] Breyer noted in his opinion, Congress can easily fix this problem by clarifying that the FTC can seek equitable remedies along with an injunction," Petros wrote. "Given that both sides of the aisle support the agency's ability to seek restitution, it should be a priority for legislators. It's common sense for ill-gotten gains to be returned to the pockets of consumers—not kept by those that would take advantage of them."

This week the investors that own the Global SuperTanker just informed me that they have made the difficult decision to cease operations of the company, effective this week…This is extremely disappointing as the aircraft has been configured and tuned with a new digital drop system and other upgrades to make it more safe and efficient. //

In an April 2020 letter posted on the National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s website the Chair of the National Interagency Aviation Committee, Joel Kerley of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, wrote to Global Supertanker Services saying the Committee would not issue a seventh interim approval of the aircraft’s retardant delivery system:

The Interagency Air Tanker Subcommittee does not support any further interim approvals without correcting some issues originally identified in the 2009 test of the system that included failure to meet coverage level 3 & 6, retention of retardant in the system after drop, aeration of the retardant causing trail off, and inconsistent flight profiles affecting retardant coverage.

Due to the current national situation regarding the Coronavirus (COVID-19), NIAC will issue an eighth interim approval to GSTS. However, NIAC will not support, nor issue a ninth interim until GSTS successfully passes all requirements of the 2013 IABS Criteria. This must be completed prior to December 31, 2020. //

Most large air tankers carry up to 3,000 gallons of retardant. The 747 is capable of carrying far more retardant than any other. When first introduced it was listed at 20,000 gallons. Then the federal government certified it at 19,200 gallons. More recently it was required to carry no more than 17,500 gallons. The second-largest capacity air tanker is the Russian-made Ilysushin IL-76 at 11,574 gallons. The DC-10 until a couple of years ago was allowed to hold 11,600 but federal officials now restrict it to 9,400. //

I asked a Lead Plane Pilot who has worked with Tanker 944 for his impressions of the aircraft. He is currently active and not authorized to comment publicly:

It’s a specialized tool, and as such it has a niche that it fills and in that niche there’s nothing else any better. That is, it puts out a huge amount of retardant in one pass, and that sometimes can be a great thing. It can travel halfway around the world and deliver product. Having said that it is also a specialized tool in that it isn’t very good at doing the little stuff.

I asked him about the retardant that sometimes trails off after a drop:

That trail off, that’s something they can beat them over the head with, but at the end of the day hardly anybody I know gives a s**t about it. Ok, well, it’s not a perfect tank.

When NASA astronauts return to the Moon in a few years, they will do so inside a lander that dwarfs that of the Apollo era. SpaceX's Starship vehicle measures 50 meters from its nose cone to landing legs. By contrast, the cramped Lunar Module that carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the Moon in 1969 stood just 7 meters tall.

This is but one of many genuinely shocking aspects of NASA's decision a week ago to award SpaceX—and only SpaceX—a contract to develop, test, and fly two missions to the lunar surface. The second flight, which will carry astronauts to the Moon, could launch as early as 2024. //

NASA awarded SpaceX $2.89 billion for these two missions. But this contract would balloon in amount should NASA select SpaceX to fly recurring lunar missions later in the 2020s. And it has value to SpaceX and NASA in myriad other ways. Perhaps most significantly, with this contract NASA has bet on a bold future of exploration. Until now, the plans NASA had contemplated for human exploration in deep space all had echoes of the Apollo program. NASA talked about "sustainable" missions and plans in terms of cost, but they were sustainable in name only.

By betting on Starship, which entails a host of development risks, NASA is taking a chance on what would be a much brighter future. One in which not a handful of astronauts go to the Moon or Mars, but dozens and then hundreds. In this sense, Starship represents a radical departure for NASA and human exploration.

"If Starship meets the goals Elon Musk has set for it, Starship getting this contract is like the US government supporting the railroads in the old west here on Earth," said Rick Tumlinson, a proponent of human settlement of the Solar System. "It is transformational to degrees no one today can understand." //

"One of the hardest engineering problems known to man is making a reusable orbital rocket," SpaceX founder Elon Musk told me about a year ago. "It's stupidly difficult to have a fully reusable orbital system."

Because there are so many technological miracles needed to validate the Starship design, I felt that NASA would not fully commit to the SpaceX vehicle as a potential lander until it had flown. Perhaps launching Starship into orbit would be enough of a technology demonstration for NASA. Or maybe SpaceX would have to land one on the Moon. This perceived need to demonstrate the viability of Starship is one reason why Musk and SpaceX have built and launched Starships at such a frenetic pace in South Texas during the last year. Only by doing, the thinking went, would NASA believe in Starship.

Instead, NASA has committed to the ambitious program even before Starship has safely landed after a high-altitude flight test. In this sense, NASA's support for Starship has come ahead of schedule. //

Consider the status quo. The large Space Launch System rocket under development by NASA will be able to launch 95 metric tons into low Earth orbit. NASA and its contractors, led by Boeing, will be able to build one a year. The expendable vehicle will launch one payload, at a cost about $2 billion per mission, and then drop into the ocean.

In terms of lift capacity, the vehicles are similar. Starship and Super Heavy should be able to put about 100 tons into low Earth orbit. However, SpaceX is already capable of building one Starship a month, and the plan is to reuse each booster and spacecraft dozens of times. Imagine the kind of space program NASA could have with the capacity to launch 100 tons into orbit every two weeks—instead of a single annual mission—for $2 billion a year. Seriously, pause a moment and really think about that. //

"In picking the Starship architecture, NASA is helping enable a path toward a super heavy launch vehicle, in-space propellant storage, in-space refueling, and large up and down mass to planetary surfaces," said Tripathi, who has examined these problems from both NASA and SpaceX's perspective.

Put another way: if Starship is successful, NASA no longer needs to pick just one or two big things to do in space. The agency will be able to do many different things at the same time.

Apple is facing two class-action lawsuits over the meaning of the words “rent” and “buy.”

In the first suit, lead plaintiff David Andino argues that Apple’s definition of the two words is deceptive since the company can terminate people’s Apple IDs and, along with them, access to content they purchased using the “buy” button. Thus, Andino is arguing that Apple allows consumers to rent content rather than purchase it outright. If he had known that his access could be cut off at any time, he says he would have not spent as much on iTunes content.

Just like Best Buy cannot come into a person’s home to repossess the movie DVD that such person purchased from it, [Apple] should not be able to remove digital content from its customers’ Purchased folders,” the suit says.

Apple countered by arguing that “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitely. But US District Court Judge John Mendez wasn’t buying it, as first noticed by the Hollywood Reporter. He rejected a motion filed by Apple that sought to dismiss the suit. That means the suit can move forward with its claims of false advertising and unfair competition, though it could still be settled before going to trial.

Apple is also up against a second class-action suit related to terminating Apple IDs. In this one, lead plaintiff Matthew Price claims he lost $24,590.05 in iTunes, the App Store, and in-app purchases, along with $7.63 in account credit, which became inaccessible when Apple terminated his account. Price’s lawsuit was filed on Tuesday.

Price’s $25,000 worth of purchases is perhaps an extreme example of what many consumers may encounter when they buy content on digital platforms, only to find it unavailable when their accounts are suspended or terminated. At issue is whether digital content available through various platforms is truly owned by individuals if the platform owner can prevent them from accessing it in the future.

Amazon is defending itself against a similar lawsuit filed last April by people who claim the company falsely advertised that they would have unlimited access to content purchased through Prime Video. They are concerned that Amazon “secretly reserves the right to terminate the consumers’ access and use of the Video Content at any time,” the suit claims.

Quote:
Apple countered by arguing that “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitely.

Amazing just how very many of us are unreasonable, isn't it?

If "no reasonable consumer would believe..." then shouldn't Apple be happy to have a jury verdict on it? Should be easy to have 12 "reasonable" jurists. //

I have friends who think I am silly to buy Bluray movies and rip them to my personal NAS that has redundancy. I just don't trust these companies to do right by me in the slightest. //

If this results in a digital version of the Doctrine of First Sale I will be dancing in the streets. This whole "you only license anything digital" thing has been a naked power grab from the start and the courts should never have gone along.