James' World 2

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After rolling out its Email Protection service in private beta last year, DuckDuckGo has announced that it’s finally available to all users. Email Protection is a forwarding service that assigns you a free “@duck.com” email address and intercepts email trackers before they hit your personal inbox.

If you need a refresher on exactly what DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection service does, it lets you use either a personal or private “duck” address to shield your real email address from companies. Before the email hits your inbox, DuckDuckGo strips it of the trackers that snoop on your location when opening an email, when you opened it, and the device you used. It also breaks down how many trackers it removed, as well as which companies they were attached to.

Personal addresses assign a name of your choice to your duck address, like emma@duck.com. Meanwhile, private addresses take things a bit further — each time you start filling out an email field, DuckDuckGo generates a random address, which might look something like avtzqdr@duck.com. Using a new private address each time you fill out an online form should make it even more difficult for companies to track you. You can also deactivate each private address individually in case one’s receiving a lot of spam.

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DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection dashboard.Image: DuckDuckGo

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To understand what environmental issues lie ahead for our warming planet, geographers often look back to the past for answers. A new study published on August 29 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences details how the landscape of ancient Egypt allowed them to create the pyramids of Giza—one of the most iconic human-made phenomenons in the world. On a now-dried-up arm of the Nile River called the Khufu branch, the study authors found that people needed the waterway to transport tools and other materials such as stones and limestones to the Giza Plateau for pyramid construction. The Nile was a vital resource not only for transportation, but for food, land for farming, and water for ancient Egypt, explains Sheisha Hader, a physical geographer at the Aix-Marseille University in France and lead author of the study.

“Good [Nile] levels promised stability [to] the ancient Egyptian society,” Hader says. “By contrast, the drought as a result of low Nile levels would be catastrophic and a reason for social unrest and sometimes, civil wars.”

In May 2019, Hader and the team studied pollen grains taken after drilling the land next to where the Khufu branch of the Nile once stood. Two of the study sites were in the supposed Khufu basin. About 109 samples dating between the Predynastic and Early Dynastic-Old Kingdom periods were collected for analysis and divided into different groups based on seven vegetation patterns. The vegetation patterns combined with other data sets involving nearby volcanic activity that could drive weather changes, solar radiation, and African water levels at the time, helped the geographers trace back changing water levels and painted a picture of how the climate looked over the last 8,000 years in Egypt. This timeline encapsulated the dates when the three pyramids of Giza—Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure—were estimated to be completed, between 2686 and 2160 BCE.

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The pyramids of Giza. Jeremy Bezanger/Unsplash

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AI-generatedAI-generated artwork is quietly beginning to reshape culture. Over the last few years, the ability of machine learning systems to generate imagery from text prompts has increased dramatically in quality, accuracy, and expression. Now, these tools are moving out of research labs and into the hands of everyday users, where they’re creating new visual languages of expression and — most likely — new types of trouble.

There are only thought to be a few dozen top-flight image-generating AI in existence right now. They’re tricky and expensive to create, requiring access to millions of images used to train the system (it looks for patterns in the pictures and copies them) and a great deal of computational grunt (for which costs vary, but a million-dollar price tag isn’t out of the question).

Right now, the output of these systems is mostly treated as a novelty when it gets splashed on a magazine cover or used to generate memes. But as we speak, artists and designers are integrating this software into their workflow, and in a short amount of time, AI-generated and AI-augmented art will be everywhere. Questions about copyright (who owns the image? Who made it?) and about potential dangers (like biased output or AI-generated misinformation) will have to be dealt with quickly.

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An AI-generated image was made with the following prompt: “A robot steam engine, barreling down the tracks at terrific speed, emitting clouds of colorful smoke.”Image: Midjourney / The Verge

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BOCA CHICA, Texas—SpaceX and T-Mobile announced an ambitious plan on Thursday evening to provide ubiquitous connectivity from space to anyone with a cell phone.

The project would pair SpaceX’s Starlink satellite technology with the second-largest wireless carrier in the United States, T-Mobile US, and its mid-band spectrum, mobile network, and large customer base.

Delivering space-to-ground Internet to mobile phones will require SpaceX to finalize development of its second generation of Starlink satellites. These will be significantly larger than the current ones, which have a mass of about 295 kg. SpaceX founder and chief engineer Elon Musk said the project could enter “beta service” before the end of 2023.

During a live event at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas, where the company is building and testing its next-generation Starship rocket, Musk appeared alongside T-Mobile US chief executive Mike Sievert. The event had something of a rocket concert flair, with a smoke machine, fireworks, and plenty of people mingling around the stage in black T-shirts. Only, these shirts bore magenta T-Mobile and white SpaceX logos, and three Starship prototypes loomed in the background.

The companies are proposing to deliver a service dreamed about since the advent of mobile telephones—no dead zones. “Our vision is, if you have a clear view of the sky, you’re connected,” Sievert said.

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T-Mobile’s Mike Sievert and SpaceX’s Elon Musk appear on stage at Starbase Thursday evening.

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