The piece of debris that fell through Alejandro Otero's roof (right) came from a support bracket jettisoned from the International Space Station. The owner of a home in southwestern Florida has formally submitted a claim to NASA for damages caused by a chunk of space debris that fell through his roof in March. The legal case is unprecedented—no one has evidently made such a claim against NASA befo

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is lifted to be placed atop an Atlas V rocket for its first crewed launch. NASA's senior leaders in human spaceflight gathered for a momentous meeting at the agency's headquarters in Washington, DC, almost exactly 10 years ago. These were the people who, for decades, had developed and flown the Space Shuttle. They oversaw the construction of the Internationa

Enlarge / Elon Musk arrives for the 2022 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 2, 2022, in New York. Eight former SpaceX employees who were fired after circulating an internal letter criticizing Elon Musk have filed charges claiming they were unlawfully fired. Unfair labor practice charges for the "retaliatory firings" were filed yesterday with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)

Over the fourth of July weekend, several open source news outlets began warning readers that the popular open source audio editing app Audacity is now "spyware." This would be very alarming if true—there aren't any obvious successors or alternatives which meet the same use cases. Audacity is free and open source, relatively easy to use, cross platform, and ideally suited for simple "prosumer" task

In September 2015, Apple managers had a dilemma on their hands: should, or should they not notify 128 million iPhone users of what remains the worst mass iOS compromise on record? Ultimately, all evidence shows, they chose to keep quiet. The mass hack first came to light when researchers uncovered 40 malicious App Store apps, a number that mushroomed to 4,000 as more researchers poked around. The

Google and Oracle's argument before the Supreme Court last October left opponents of API copyrights extremely nervous. For the previous decade, Google had been arguing in lower courts that it didn't infringe copyright law when it re-implemented Java for use in Android. Google had lost—twice—at the appellate level. Last October, justices for the nation's highest court seemed skeptical as well. Not

Enlarge / The copyright to The Great Gatsby—the 1925 novel, not the 2013 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio—will expire two years from today. As the ball dropped over Times Square last night, all copyrighted works published in 1923 fell into the public domain (with a few exceptions). Everyone now has the right to republish them or adapt them for use in new works. It's the first time this has happene

A new system that securely checks whether your passwords have been made public in known data breaches has been integrated into the widely used password manager, 1Password. This new tool lets customers find out if their passwords have been leaked without ever transmitting full credentials to a server. Security researcher Troy Hunt this week announced his new version of "Pwned Passwords," a search t

Enlarge / Roughly translated, many parts of the Voynich Manuscript say that women should take a nice bath if they are feeling sick. Here you can see a woman doing just that. UPDATE: Scholars have started to debunk these claims about the Voynich manuscript, noting that the translation "makes no sense" and that a lot of the so-called original findings were done by other researchers. Read our article

Child and consumer advocacy groups are unhappy with Google's new YouTube Kids app, which launched in February of this year. They say the app contains videos like a Sesame Street episode “dubbed with long strings of expletives,” references to pedophilia in a My Little Pony review, and a Budweiser commercial. Other videos are less insidious—how-tos on using circular saws, ASMR videos showing a woman