A Blue Origin space launch from Texas on Monday went horribly wrong as the booster rocket exploded shortly after takeoff. No one was injured in the incident and the capsule carrying about three dozen experiments managed to detach safely. The company owned by Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos now faces delays to its suborbital tourist flights, pending a government investigation.
About one minute and four seconds into Monday’s launch, the New Shepard booster flared orange and then exploded. The capsule on top avoided destruction, falling back from the height of 8.8 kilometers to land on the ground with the aid of parachutes.
“It appears we’ve experienced an anomaly with today’s flight,” Blue Origin’s Erika Wagner said on the launch livestream after the explosion. “This was unplanned and we do not have any details yet, but our crew capsule was able to escape successfully.”
“We’re responding to an issue this morning at our Launch Site One location in West Texas,” the company tweeted out about an hour later. “This was a payload mission with no astronauts on board. The capsule escape system functioned as designed.”
Booster failure on today’s uncrewed flight. Escape system performed as designed. pic.twitter.com/xFDsUMONTh
The mission, dubbed NS-23, carried “36 payloads from academia, research institutions and students across the globe,” Blue Origin said. Half were sponsored by NASA, according to the Associated Press. The two experiments attached to the booster were destroyed in the explosion.
No more astronaut wings for commercial space travelers
It was the ninth launch of this particular booster and capsule, which are slightly different from what Blue Origin uses for its “tourist” suborbital trips – the most famous of which took Bezos and actor William Shatner to the boundary of space.
So far, Blue Origin has taken 31 humans up on New Shepard rockets, most recently in August. All of its launches have been grounded pending the outcome of the investigation into the explosion, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said.
Monday’s launch was delayed by almost two weeks by bad weather. Blue Origin’s mishap comes about a week after NASA scrubbed the launch of its Artemis 1 lunar mission due to a fuel leak.
YouTube creators earn money from Google-placed ads on their videos.
A number of factors determine how much money they make, including video views.
Creators said how much YouTube pays for 1 million views ranged from $3,400 to $30,000.
While many factors — content niche and country, among them — determine how much money a YouTuber earns on any particular video, the number of views it gets is perhaps the most significant.
When a YouTube video hits 1 million views, there’s almost a guaranteed big payday for its creator. In some cases, creators can make five-figures from a single video if it accrues that many views.
Three creators explained how much money YouTube had paid them. YouTube pays $3,400 to $30,000 for 1 million views, these creators said.
When tech creator Shelby Church spoke with Insider, she had earned $30,000 from a video about Amazon FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon). At the time, the video had accrued 1.8 million views.
Her RPM rate — or earnings per 1,000 views — are relatively high, she said, because of her content niche. Business, personal finance, and technology channels tend to earn more per view.
“YouTubers don’t always make a ton of money, and it really depends on what kind of videos you’re making,” she said.
Influencers can earn 55% of a video’s ad revenue if they are part of YouTube’s Partner Program, or YPP. To qualify for the program, they must have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time on their long-form videos.
They can also make money from shorts, YouTube’s short-form video offering. In order to qualify, creators need to reach 10 million views in 90 days and have 1,000 subscribers. YouTube pools ad revenue from shorts and pays an undisclosed amount to record labels for music licensing. Creators receive 45% of the remaining money based on their percentage of the total shorts views on the platform.
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Some pictures were turned into memes and distributed through internal chats, former workers told the agency
Tesla workers shared “highly invasive” images and videos recorded by customers’ electric cars, making fun of them on internal chat groups, several former employees of Elon Musk’s company have told Reuters.
The electric-car manufacturer obtains consent from its clients to collect data from vehicles in order to improve its self-driving technology. However, the company assures owners that the whole system is “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy,” the agency pointed out in its report on Thursday.
According to nine former workers who talked to the agency, groups of employees shared private footage of customers in Tesla’s internal one-on-one chats between 2019 and 2022.
One of the clips in question captured a man approaching his electric car while he was completely naked, one of the sources said.
Tesla recalls over 360,000 cars over self-driving threat
Others featured crashes and road-rage incidents. One particular video of a Tesla hitting a child on a bike in a residential area spread around the company’s office in San Mateo, California “like wildfire,” an ex-employee claimed.
“I’m bothered by it because the people who buy the car, I don’t think they know that their privacy is, like, not respected… We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids,” another former worker told the agency.
Seven former employees also told Reuters that the software they used at work allowed them to see the location where the photo or video was made, despite Tesla assuring its customers that “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.”
The agency noted that it could not obtain any of the pictures or clips described by its sources, who said they were all deleted. Some former employees also told the journalists that they had only seen private data being shared for legitimate purposes, such as seeking assistance for colleagues. Tesla did not respond when approached for comment on the issue by Reuters.
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Sweden’s Defense Ministry has reportedly barred employees from using the Chinese-owned app on their work phones
Sweden’s military has reportedly cracked down on TikTok, decreeing that staff members are no longer allowed to use the Chinese-owned video-sharing application on their devices at work because of security concerns.
The Swedish Defense Ministry on Monday issued its decision, which was viewed by Agence-France Presse, banning the use of TikTok. Security concerns were raised based on “the reporting that has emerged through open sources regarding how the app handles user information and the actions of the owner company, ByteDance,” the ministry said.
The move follows similar restrictions imposed by other EU countries in recent weeks. For example, France banned government employees from downloading “recreational applications,” including TikTok, on their work phones. Norway barred use of the app on devices that can access its parliament’s computer network, while the UK and Belgium banned it on all government phones. Denmark’s Defense Ministry and Latvia’s Foreign Ministry imposed their TikTok bans earlier this month.
China responds to TikTok allegations
“Using mobile phones and tablets can in itself be a security risk, so therefore we don’t want TikTok on our work equipment,” Swedish Defense Ministry press secretary Guna Graufeldt told AFP.
The US, Canada and New Zealand previously banned their federal employees from using TikTok on government-issued devices, citing fears of ByteDance’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Members of Congress may try to ban the app from the US market altogether after testimony at a congressional hearing last week by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew failed to ease their security concerns. “They’ve actually united Republicans and Democrats out of the concern of allowing the CCP to control the most dominant media platform in America,” US Representative Mike Gallagher said on Sunday in an ABC News interview.
Chinese officials have denied claims that TikTok is used to collect the personal data of its American users. “The Chinese government has never asked and will never ask any company or individual to collect or provide data, information or intelligence located abroad against local laws,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told reporters last week. She added that Washington has attacked TikTok without providing any evidence that it threatens US security.
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