Washington Post: Leaked secret documents detail up to four additional Chinese spy balloons. “U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of up to four additional Chinese spy balloons, and questions lingered about the true capabilities of the one that flew over the continental United States in January and February, according to previously unreported top-secret intelligence documents.”
WIRED: How One Guy’s AI Tracked the Chinese Spy Balloon Across the US. “EARLIER THIS MONTH, entrepreneur Corey Jaskolski pulled out a pen and drew his best guess at what the surveillance balloon shot down by a US jet would have looked like from space. Then he fed the sketch and ‘a gob’ of recent satellite images from the area where the balloon was taken down into algorithms developed by his image and video detection startup Synthetatic, and waited. Within two minutes, he says, the algorithms found the 200-foot-tall balloon off the coast of South Carolina.”
Bloomberg: Google Hands SoftBank Patents From Failed Balloon Moonshot. “Alphabet has transfered about 200 patents from its Loon project to the telecoms unit of SoftBank Group Corp., the Japanese company said in a statement on Thursday. SoftBank is developing its own wireless technology that uses fixed-wing autonomous aircraft as a flying base station.”
Traverse City Record-Eagle: Find balloon debris? Get a photo and send to new website. “A university researcher is tracking balloon litter in the Great Lakes region to spread awareness of how it harms the environment. Lara O’Brien, a master’s student at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, created [the site] to help citizen scientists track where popular balloon launches end. It maps where the balloons are found and allows people to submit photos of the debris.”
FastStuff: Google Focuses on Project Loon for Global Internet. “As news that Google decided to ditch project Titan that was an effort to make internet access globally available to everyone spread these days, people started wondering again whether the vision of a truly world-wide web is currently tangible or not. The reality is that we should fear not as Google is actually focusing their efforts on that part to a far more feasible and effective solution that uses high altitude balloons instead of drones.”
(Well, not really “boom”. More like clunk.) A poor Project Loon balloon went splat in South Africa. “KZN farmer Hennie Strydom and his wife woke to a strange sight on their farm near Rorke’s Drift in KwaZulu-Natal recently – a crashed Google Loon….Not initially knowing what had landed on their farm, Strydom noticed a phone number on the wreckage – which he dialled.” He got somebody in Sweden. No, wait, different news story…
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