Month: May 2022

Enlarge / The US Supreme Court building. (credit: Getty Images | Grant Faint)

Big Tech lobby groups have asked the US Supreme Court to block a Texas state law that prohibits social media companies from moderating content based on a user’s “viewpoint.”

The state’s so-called “censorship” law was previously blocked by a federal judge who ruled that it violates the social networks’ First Amendment right to moderate user-submitted content. But the law was reinstated last week by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which granted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s motion to stay the preliminary injunction.

The Fifth Circuit ruling came in a majority vote of three judges. Instead of seeking an en banc hearing with all the Fifth Circuit court’s judges, two tech groups submitted an emergency application to the Supreme Court on Friday. The appeal was filed by NetChoice and the Computer & Communications & Industry Association (CCIA), which represent companies including Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Yahoo.

Enlarge / Sony’s previous teases suggested that we’d see more games in this week’s list of the revamped PlayStation Plus game selection. (credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Starting next week, the PlayStation Plus subscription service will relaunch exclusively in Asia across PlayStation and PC platforms, with other regions’ relaunches to follow throughout June. With such little time to go, Sony has decided to finally begin revealing its launch game selection across a new series of subscription tiers.

But Sony’s Monday announcement falls well short of advertising we’ve previously seen. We now know that 119 games are coming to three PlayStation Plus “collections,” and they will be available in the service’s $15/month “Premium” tier (with fewer games in the $10/month “Extra” tier). That number comes nowhere close to the “up to 740 games” count across six generations of PlayStation systems that Sony previously suggested would be coming.

Sony representatives did not immediately answer questions about whether this availability gap will narrow once the service rolls out. For now, we’re left with the announcement’s tease that more games may appear between now and next week, as Sony is calling this initial 119-strong list “some of the games” coming to the refreshed PlayStation Plus library.

Enlarge (credit: By Nilsf – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23446041)

A recent toxicology analysis of the 500-year-old remains of two small children sacrificed in a ritual atop southern Peru’s Ampato volcano showed that the children’s hair and fingernails contained traces of cocaine, as well as two chemical compounds from a flowering vine that’s a key ingredient in the psychedelic beverage ayahuasca.

The compounds in question, harmine and harmaline, are both part of a group of antidepressants called MAOIs (monoamine oxidase inhibitors). The only possible place the Inca could have found these compounds is the flowering vine known to modern science as Banisteriopsis caapi—and to the Indigenous Quechua people as “liana of the dead.” Famously, the liana is one of the two main ingredients in a ritual drink called ayahuasca, which can induce hallucinations or an altered state of mind.

But the analysis found no trace of the compound DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine), which makes ayahuasca such a powerful hallucinogenic. That compound comes from the other main ingredient in ayahuasca, a shrub called chacruna (which, incidentally, is a relative of the plant that gives us coffee).

Enlarge / Politically, Boeing’s spacecraft has done a lot of heavy lifting for NASA’s commercial crew program. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

The last few years have been pretty rough for the Boeing Company. Its newest generation of 737 aircraft, the Max, was grounded in 2019 after two fatal crashes. And following a series of poor management decisions, the company has continued to lose commercial aircraft market share to European multinational corporation Airbus.

Boeing’s defense segment has fared little better. After winning a large military refueling contract, Boeing started producing the KC-46 tanker for the Air Force. But because of manufacturing and design problems with the tanker, the company has taken about $5 billion in losses during the last decade.

Finally, there is Boeing’s space unit, which has struggled to adapt to the new era of commercial space and fixed-price contracts. Most visibly, Boeing has competed directly with SpaceX over the last decade in the commercial crew program to deliver NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. So far, things have not gone terribly well. Boeing is running about three years behind SpaceX, which has now launched five crewed missions for NASA.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Thomas Trutschel)

Twitch, the Amazon-owned livestreaming site that caters primarily to gamers, said it removed streamed footage of a shooting in Buffalo, New York, this weekend “less than two minutes after the violence started.”

An 18-year-old white man used an assault rifle to fire on crowds of shoppers in a Buffalo supermarket Saturday, authorities said. The attack—which killed 10 and injured three, including 11 Black victims—is being investigated as a hate crime after the shooter allegedly posted a lengthy manifesto citing 4chan posts regarding the racist “great replacement theory” as his motivation.

Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said Saturday that the shooter “had a camera and was livestreaming what he was doing” during the attack. The Twitch channel that had hosted that video has now been taken down, with its content marked as “currently unavailable due to a violation of Twitch’s community guidelines or terms of service.”