Uber and NASA are teaming up for flying taxis, Yahoo still doesn’t know how 3 billion of its accounts were hacked four years ago, and biotech mosquitoes will soon be loosed in the United States.
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From Facebook – Now this is the type of future I’m talking about. Uber and NASA are teaming up for a flying taxi service in order to provide yet another form of transportation. Uber wants to make taxi-sized drones with vertical take-off and landing that would fly at a low altitude, so basically a mix of a helicopter and a speeder that you might see in Star Wars. The tech company signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA for the development of ‘unmanned traffic management’, marking the first time the tech industry and US government have teamed up in this way. Uber plans to start testing these flying taxis in Los Angeles, Dallas-Forth Worth, and Dubai, with a goal to get the service up and running by the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. As for how expensive this will be, Uber says it won’t be anymore expensive than current Uber X prices. Talk about flying on a bargain.
From Reddit – Four years ago, Yahoo suffered one of the biggest security breaches in history, revealing just last month that effectively all 3 billion Yahoo user accounts have been affected by that hack, and it according to former CEO Marissa Mayer, the company still doesn’t know the specifics of the attack. Mayer, along with Equifax executives, was subpoenaed by the US Senate Commerce Committee to speak about the massive data breaches that occurred while she was CEO. When pressed about the attack, which has been revealed to be a state-sponsored attack by Russia, Mayer said, “To this day we have not been able to identify the intrusion that led to this theft. We don’t exactly understand how the act was perpetrated. That certainly led to some of the areas where we had gaps of information.” Mayer stepped down as CEO after the company’s sale to Verizon was finalized this summer.
And from Reddit once more – Here’s a bit of cool bio technology news. The US Environmental Protection Agency has approved the use of a startup called MosquitoMate’s biopesticide against the Zika virus. The startup will use mosquitoes carrying a common bacteria to infect mosquitoes carrying Zika and other diseases like yellow fever. The startup will release its bacteria-carrying Zap males in 20 states and DC. Those male mosquitoes can effectively kill off harmful populations of mosquitoes by preventing future eggs from hatching. It plans to sell what they’re calling ‘good guy bugs’ to hotels, establishments, and homeowners through summer-long subscriptions.
That’s what’s trending today. Hashtag Trending is produced by IT World Canada. Today’s episode is sponsored by Cogeco Peer 1, the company that enables businesses to unlock their IT potential. Learn more at CP1.com.