Good morning! It’s a busy world out there. All The News You Missed Overnight gives you a guide to everything techy that happened while you were sleeping.
Australian Federal Government Bans Hoverboards (Temporarily)An interim ban on not-really-hoverboards was announced by the Assistant Treasurer Friday, preventing the sale of dodgy hoverboards that are prone to exploding. The ban will take effect from Saturday March 19 and will be in place for 60 days, until further action can be decided upon.
The revised Australian response comes two days after the US officially banned hoverboards. It’s become pretty common knowledge that so-called ‘hoverboards’ not only make you look like a wanker, but are inherently dangerous too.
How The US Government Keeps Its Phone Spying Gear A Secret
Federal agencies go to extreme lengths to keep powerful phone spying gear secret — and new information shows just how the US government pressures investigators to keep it under wraps.
Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, published yesterday, show how the Department of Justice urges investigators to hide its surveillance techniques from the public. This phone spying relies on a device made by the Harris Corporation. Known as a “Stingray”, it mimics mobile phone towers to grab data from phones. And the US government really doesn’t want anyone to know more than that.
Asteroid Hunters Around The World Just Spotted Something Incredible
If an asteroid were closing in on our planet, we’d know about it quickly thanks to a dedicated network of astronomers. But this week, the Near Earth Object Coordination Center (NEOCC) had its eyes fixed on something else: two Mars-bound spacecraft attempting to escape Earth’s gravity well. And they did a bang-up job capturing the event in real-time.
ExoMars — a joint European and Russian mission that will search for signs of life on the Red Planet — blasted off Earth aboard a Russian Proton rocket earlier this week. Because of the complex series of engine burns and orbital manoeuvres needed to propel the spacecraft out of Earth’s orbit, it was twelve anxiety-inducing hours before the European Space Agency could declare the launch a success. But that long window gave the NEOCC a rare observing opportunity.
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