The Truth: Wunderlist Woes, ESA’s Space Trash Salvage Mission, Mechwarrior 5

Welcome to The Truth for Tuesday, 10 December 2019. Here’s a quick tech news update for you, before I’m off to the pub…

Yahoo is shutting down Yahoo Groups and Verizon, which bought Yahoo in 2016, is apparently actively preventing a group of volunteers from backing up the huge amounts of data that will be deleted along with it.

Well, as of sometime on December 5th a huge number of the archivists that were scrambling to rescue archives from Yahoo Groups, had their email addresses apparently banned so they can no longer rescue the archives anymore of the groups they had set up operations to do so.

Apple is suing the former chief architect of its iPhone and iPad processors, because he dared to quit and start his own chip design business.

Apple’s lawsuit alleged Williams hid the fact he was preparing to leave Apple to start his own business while still working at Apple, and drew on his work in steering iPhone processor design to create his new company. Crucially, Tim Cook & Co’s lawyers claimed he tried to lure away staff from his former employer. All of this was, allegedly, in breach of his contract.

The Register on the Wunderlist migration to Microsoft To Do:

In other words, we have done our utmost to slowly kill this thing off but you still keep using it so we’re bringing the axe down this time. Now get with the Microsoft-branded future or fuck off.

He he. I like it when they tell it how it is over at El Reg.

ESA is heading up the first mission into orbit to clean up space junk.

The plan will see the capture of a Vega Secondary Payload Adaptor (VESPA) upper stage left in an 800km by 660km orbit by the second flight of ESA’s Vega launcher in 2013. The derelict object weighs in at 100kg, so is roughly representative of a small satellite. The ClearSpace-1 spacecraft, equipped with four robotic arms to grapple debris, will be launched to a 500km orbit for commissioning before heading to VESPA for rendezvous and a destructive de-orbit.

If all goes well with the relatively simple VESPA, then more complex captures will be attempted.

Makes me immediately think of that scene in Firefly. “Let’s moon ‘em!”

Not a good weekend for Tesla drivers, going by this report on The Register:

A man driving a Tesla Model 3 on autopilot mode rammed into the back of two police cars and another vehicle parked on the side of a highway in Connecticut, USA, on Saturday.

Another Tesla bad boy driver got caught up in another minor accident, too. In Los Angeles, California, the company’s CEO Elon Musk hit a traffic bollard after he left the Japanese sushi restaurant Nobu in a Cybertruck, the silver, daft-looking, low-poly jalopy unveiled last month. Musk was out celebrating with his kooky popstar girlfriend Grimes after he won his defamation case last week, and the excitement probably got to his head.

Nineteen years after its predecessor, Mechwarrior 5 is now out. Epic Games Store exclusive, though.

If you’re interested in the whole Boeing 737 MAX story, might I shamelessly plug a podcast episode on this I just released? I did a lot of research and go very in-depth on the topic.


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