OK, sit down, everyone — we don’t want you falling over and hurting yourself when you learn the news that actually yes, your phone has been listening to your conversations all along. Shocking, we know, but that certainly seems to be what an outfit called Cox Media Group (CMG) does with its “Active Listening” software, according to a leaked slide deck that was used to pitch potential investors. The gist is that the software uses a smartphone’s microphone to listen to conversations and pick out keywords that it feeds to its partners, namely Google, Facebook, and Amazon so that they can target you with directed advertisements. Ever have an IRL conversation about something totally random only to start seeing references to that subject pop up where they never did before? We sure have, and while “relationship mining” seemed like a more parsimonious explanation back in 2017, the state of tech makes eavesdropping far more plausible today. Then there’s the whole thing of basically being caught red-handed. The Big Three all huffed and puffed about how they were shocked, SHOCKED to learn that this was going on, with reactions ranging from outright denial of ever partnering with CMG to quietly severing their relationship with the company. So much for years of gaslighting on this.

In other dystopian news, the American Radio Relay League just wrote a $1 million check to end a ransomware attack. According to an ARRL statement, unidentified “threat actors” found their way into computer systems at the group’s Newington, Connecticut headquarters and related cloud-based systems, which allowed them to install encryption packages on laptops, desktops, and servers running a variety of operating systems. The ARRL’s crisis team managed to talk the cyberattackers down from their original demand of several million dollars to just a million, which all things considered was probably the path of least resistance and lowest cost. It’s a shame that things have come to that, but here we are.

The long saga of Starliner’s first crewed test flight is finally over, as the beleaguered spacecraft pushed back from the International Space Station and headed back to a midnight landing in New Mexico on Saturday. The return was sans crew, of course, with NASA being unwilling to risk the lives of astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore in a spacecraft that hadn’t really performed up to snuff on the way up to the ISS. As if the leaky thrusters weren’t enough, just before the hatches were closed Wilmore reported weird noises coming from a speaker in Starliner. He managed to capture the sounds on his mic for Mission Control, which for all the world sounded like someone repeatedly banging on a pipe in the distance. The weird thing about the sound is the regularity, which sounded a little faster than one per second. We’re keen to see if NASA shares any in-depth engineering information on this and all the other Starliner anomalies now that the craft is back on the ground.

If you’ve ever had to do extensive overhead work, such as sanding or painting ceilings, or working under a car on a lift, you know the burn that starts to set in after just a short while of holding your arms over your head. Up to now, the only way to fix that was either hit the gym and work on upper body strength, or find another way to make a living. But now that we’re living in the future, you can just strap on your own exoskeleton backpack and take a load off the robotic way. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ExoActive exoskeleton comes from Festool, best known for its wonderfully well-engineered premium tools that often command a premium price. The ExoActive is battery-powered and straps on like a backpack with extensions that support the upper arms. It can be set to different work heights and provides a boost in lifting power, taking some of the weight off your shoulder girdle and transmitting it to your lower back. Unlike other exoskeletons we’ve seen breathless press releases for, this one seems like something you can buy right now. Sure, it’s expensive, but it’s a fraction of the cost of shoulder surgery.

And finally, Animagraffs is back with an incredibly detailed look inside the inner workings of a 16th-century sailing vessel. The video really captures what it took to build vessels that could (just barely) sail around the world for the first time. We loved the explanation of the rigging, especially the differences between the standing rigging and the running rigging. If you don’t know your clewline from your backstay, this Blender tour de force will set you straight.

The Sun has been remarkably active lately, so much so that it might have set a new sunspot record. According to the sun watchers at the Space Weather Prediction Center, on August 8, the Solar Dynamics Observatory snapped a picture that was positively bedazzled with sunspots. Counting methods vary, but one count put the sunspot number at a whopping 337 that day. That would be the largest number since 2001, during the peak of Solar Cycle 23. The sunspot number is highly correlated with solar storms and coronal mass ejections; more spots mean more magnetic activity and more chance for something to go very, very wrong. We’ve been pretty lucky so far with Solar Cycle 25; despite being much more active than the relatively lazy Cycle 24 and much stronger than predicted, most of this cycle’s outbursts have been directed away from Earth or only dealt us a glancing blow. Seeing all those spots, though, makes us think it’s only a matter of time before we get hit with something that does more than make pretty lights.

Having done our share of roofing, we can safely say it’s a pretty tough job. Everything is heavy, it’s either boiling hot or freezing cold, and one moment’s inattention can make for a very bad day. Plus, the fiberglass shards in your skin at the end of the day can be incredibly annoying. On the other hand, a good roofing job is a thing of beauty, and there’s immense satisfaction in having been the one to do it. But, with apologies to Steve Miller, time keeps on slipping into the future, humans are expensive and unreliable, and someone will eventually try to automate humans out of pretty much every job.

It’s roofing’s turn now with the aptly named Rufus auto roof robot. It’s a hybrid robot with a base unit containing a hopper for shingles and a SCARA arm that positions, aligns, and nails down the shingles. The base unit, in turn, is moved around the surface of the roof by a capstan-drive cable robot, with cables anchored to the corners of the roof.

It’s an interesting idea, but one that’s going to take some development to make it practical. For one thing, we can see safety regulators having a fit over those cables, which will be a tripping hazard for the workers who have to keep the bot fed with shingles and nails. Also, a roof that’s completely free of obstructions like vent stacks, skylights, or chimneys is a rare roof indeed, and it seems like the cable system would foul on such obstructions very easily. Still, you’ve got to start somewhere, and it’ll be interesting to see how this develops. Or maybe we’ll just throw Atlas at it.

Head up, hams — another spectrum land grab appears to be underway. This one is a little hard to follow, but what we see is that a company called NexNav, which is currently licensed for a Location and Monitoring Service in the 900-MHz band, wants to split the 902 MHz to 928 MHz band and start blasting out high-powered signals on the upper part of the band, apparently for a new 5G position system that will serve as a backup to satellite location systems like GPS. The problem is that amateur radio operators have a secondary allocation in that band, which, despite the company’s unsupported claims to the contrary, will most likely be swamped by their 2,000-watt effective radiated power signals. LoRaWAN fans might also take note of the proposed change, which would likely make life difficult for them and other ISM-band users. It might be time to write some strongly worded letters.

And finally, what a time to be alive! While Boeing has figured out how to turn the ISS into a low-earth orbit Gilligan’s Island by unintentionally extending an eight-day visit into an open-ended stay, down here on Earth, we’re tackling the real problems, like how to safely eat Doritos in space. Luckily, the food scientists at Frito-Lay put their top people on the problem and came up with “Cool Ranch Zero Gravity Doritos,” which substitute a flavored oil spray for the normal finger-staining powdered spice blend that would get everywhere in an environment where gravity doesn’t pull it down onto your shirt or into your neck-beard. And to keep cornmeal crumbs from getting loose, they shrunk the triangular chips down to about a third the size of a regular Dorito, so you can just stuff the whole chip in your mouth without biting it first.

We have many thoughts on this, primarily that being unable to stuff at least three regular-size Doritos in your mouth at one time should be grounds for disqualification from spaceflight and that they literally could have chosen any flavor to send to space, but they had to make it Cool Ranch, which raises many questions of its own. But mainly, we’re just sad that this is what has become of spaceflight — and yes, we know about Tang, but this seems a lot worse.