With no advance fanfare, Amazon just released a speaker called Echo that’s always on and has a built-in personal assistant that you can talk to. It might sound like a weird mashup of features, but it’s a recontextualization of the world’s Cortanas and Siris that could actually make a lot of sense. It’s like a hybrid of smart home devices, digital personal assistants, and Jibo the family robot.

Echo is always listening, but only activates when you say a preprogrammed wake word. (The default seems to be “Alexa.”) You can ask Echo factual questions, tell it to play certain music, or have it do tasks like make a to-do list for you or add a reminder to your calendar. And Amazon says that Echo has “far-field voice recognition” so Echo can hear you across a big room.

When you’re not close to Echo, you can control it with a standalone app for Android and Fire OS, through browsers in iOS, or using a desktop app. In addition to its artificial intelligence, Echo is also a normal Bluetooth speaker standing 9 inches tall. It can play music on command from Amazon Music Library, Prime Music, TuneIn, and iHeartRadio.

The product is definitely meant to be stationary, since it has a power cord instead of a battery, but at least you never need to charge it. Amazon will send out invitations “in the coming weeks” to buy Echo before it releases the product widely. The speaker will cost $199, or $99 for people with Prime subscriptions.

Though this Echo announcement comes out of the blue, it doesn’t seem completely crazy. Amazon released its first smartphone, Fire Phone, in June and is clearly attempting to build an ecosystem around Amazon Instant and Fire OS. And Amazon has slowly been acquiring companies over the last few years with relevant expertise, like U.K.-based interactive content creator Pushbutton in 2011, text-to-speech company IVONA in 2013, and Evi, a natural language artificial intelligence company, in 2012. Not to mention the Web analytics company Alexa Internet, which Amazon bought way back in 1996, and which could be the inspiration for Echo’s wake word.

The Fire Phone may not have done so well, but maybe pulling a Beyoncé will work for Amazon this time.

Astronauts on the International Space Station have had so much training that once they’re up there, they probably get pretty used to the conditions. But no one could be jaded enough to be bored by the crazy physics of microgravity, right? Right.

So NASA astronauts Steve Swanson and Reid Wiseman, and European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst, made the video that we would all want to make if we were up there. They explored water’s surface tension in microgravity. That is to say, they messed around with balls of floating water. And then, because they are geniuses, they stuck a waterproof GoPro inside one to get a water’s-eye view.

And since NASA has been working on a project to shoot space in 3-D, the astronauts used one of the 3-D cameras to film the whole water blob thing, too. If you have some red-blue stereoscopic 3-D glasses handy—who doesn’t?—you can watch that version here. Now that David Bowie gave permission for Chris Hadfield’s version of Space Oddity to go back on YouTube, the astronauts-doing-awesome-stuff video genre is back on top.

Human reproduction has long been a preoccupation of ethicists, scientists and science fiction, from the lab-reared children of Brave New World to the artificial uteri shown in The Matrix. And as the recent furor over Facebook and Apple’s proposal to offer to fund the freezing of their female employee’s eggs indicated, we’re far from settled about how emerging reproductive technologies will affect the way we live. At a time when the science of genotyping, uterus transplants, and the design of artificial sperm and eggs continues to evolve, it’s worth pausing to consider what is within the realm of the possible when it comes to human reproduction, and which questions we should be asking before we get there.

On the afternoon of Thursday, Nov. 20, Future Tense—a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University—will host an event on the potential ramifications of new reproductive technologies at the New America office in Washington, D.C. For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website.

Agenda

12:15 p.m.: Lunch and Registration

12:30 p.m. - 12:45 p.m. Engineering the Post-Modern Family

Liza Mundy
Director, Breadwinning and Caregiving Program, New America

12:45 p.m. - 1:30 pm Where Babies Will Come From

Dieter Egli
Senior research fellow, New York Stem Cell Foundation

Rebecca Soko
President, American Society for Reproductive Medicine

Moderator
Darshak Sanghavi
Health care columnist, Slate
Associate professor of pediatrics, University of Massachusetts Medical School

1:30 p.m. - 1:50 p.m. Family Feud Circa 2100

Dan Kois
Co-host of “Mom and Dad Are Fighting,” Slate's parenting podcast

Allison Benedikt
Co-host of “Mom and Dad Are Fighting,” Slate's parenting podcast

1:50 p.m. - 2:35 p.m. Whose Business Is Reproduction?

Debora Spar
President, Barnard College
Author, The Baby Business: How Money, Science and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception

Evan Snyder
FDA Cellular, Tissue and Gene Therapy Advisory Committee
Director, Program in Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute

Camille Hammond
CEO, Tinina Q Cade Foundation

Moderator
Liza Mundy
Director, Breadwinning and Caregiving Program, New America

2:35 p.m. - 3:20 p.m. In the Gattaca-Family Way: How Far Is Too Far?

Charis Thompson
Chancellor's professor and chair, gender women's studies, University of California, Berkley

Marcy Darnovsky
Executive director, Center for Genetics and Society

Jane Maienschein
Director, Center for Biology and Society, Arizona State University

Moderator
Christine Rosen
Senior editor, the New Atlantis

The Internet Archive recently started a project called the Internet Arcade that emulates more than 900 arcade games from the 1970s to 1990s so people can play them in their browsers. The idea of a video game archive may seem somewhat strange, but it’s gaining traction as the form ages.

And now the Electronic Frontier Foundation is filing exemption requests with the U.S. Copyright Office to make it legal for people to modify old and abandoned video games so fans can keep playing them. Currently that practice is banned under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

One of the problems with old video games is that if their developers cease to support them, they may be unplayable because of safeguards like authentication checks with a server that no longer exists. While these measures would have previously protected the game from piracy, in its obsolescence they serve only to make it unplayable.

EFF gives the examples of Civilization V and Mario Kart Wii as games that wouldn’t be playable if they didn’t have official “matchmaking” servers facilitating behind the scenes. If someone wanted to revive games like this under current regulations by creating a server workaround, it would be illegal. EFF notes, though, that it is not asking for exemptions for games like World of Warcraft, known as “persistent worlds,” where a majority of the game’s total content is stored on the developer’s servers instead of the users’.

The petitions also address the fact that it is currently illegal under the DMCA to unlock car software, even for legitimate purposes. Corynne McSherry, the EFF’s intellectual property director, said in a statement that:

The DMCA was supposed to help protect against copyright infringement, but it's been abused to interfere with all kinds of lawful activities that have nothing to do with infringement ... Software is in all kinds of devices, from cars to coffee-makers to alarm clocks. If that software is locked down by DRM, it's likely that you can't tinker, repair, and re-use those objects without incurring legal risk.

The EFF says that creating an exemption so these particular cases can be considered fair use wouldn’t be economically harmful, especially in the case of “abandoned” video games.

Last week a California jury rendered a $16.5 million verdict against a dating site for allegedly sharing user data with more than 1,000 third parties. Dating profiles are always somewhat embarrassing, but the data in question was particularly sensitive to users: their STI status. PositiveSingles billed its site as “100% Anonymous,” with a target audience of single adults wishing to escape the stigma associated with many STIs. Users may select from a dropdown menu of STIs, several of which are—bafflingly—fully treatable. What went wrong?

Unbeknownst to many users, PositiveSingles’ parent company, SuccessfulMatch, allegedly shared user data with hundreds of its other dating sites, which include illustrious titles such as RichDateBusty, EquestrianCupid, NudistFriends, and, according to one report, Herpesinmouth.

The state jury found PositiveSingles guilty of fraud, malice, and oppression in a case where the plaintiff’s profile showed up on a number of sites, allegedly misrepresenting his race, sexual orientation, HIV status, and religion by exporting his dating profile to niche sites associated with each trait. As a lawyer in the case explained, the “plaintiff is ... not black, gay, Christian or HIV positive and was unaware that defendant was creating websites that focused on such traits that would include his profile, thus indicating that he was all of these things and more.” It’s kind of like having your JDate profile show up on Christian Mingle without your knowledge. (Except it also reveals your medical conditions in the process!) SuccessfulMatch’s webpage currently beckons prospective business partners with “Pre-populated Member Databases” sharing “thousands of profiles with other similar sites we have already set up.”

SuccessfulMatch’s terms of services said that it reserved the right to share user profiles with other sites within their network. A July 2013 court report recounts the website’s privacy policy statement: “information will not be disclosed knowingly or willfully to any third party without your authorization as described in detail in the SM.com Privacy Policy, except as may otherwise be permissible by this Agreement and required by the Services offered by SM.com.” But PositiveSingles users claim they had no idea, and on Oct. 29, the court found several parts of the terms of service to be unreasonable.

For privacy activists concerned with increasingly baffling website terms of service, this represents a small victory for user rights. A large majority of Internet users do not read terms of service at all before agreeing to them. That doesn’t mean, however, that websites can get away with putting anything in fine print. In this case, at least, misleading users had multimillion-dollar consequences.

This is also not the first lawsuit brought against SuccessfulMatch. In April, a judge dismissed a federal class action suit after two women claimed that SuccessfulMatch illegally shared their HIV-positive status and other personal identifying information with more than 1,000 other websites. This matter largely centered around the language of the original claims. The BBC reports that the women have filed an amended claim.

On Tuesday at Web Summit in Dublin, former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker said that expanded encryption efforts by tech companies like Apple and Google do more to harm U.S. intelligence than they do to defend against wrongful and excessive surveillance worldwide.

But that’s not all! During a panel that included Matthew Prince, the CEO of cloud security company Cloudflare, Baker also told Guardian special projects editor James Ball that strengthening encryption is bad for business, citing BlackBerry as an example.

The state department has funded some of these tools, such as Tor, which has been used in Arab Spring revolutions or to get past the Chinese firewall, but these crypto wars are mainly being fought between the American government and American companies. ... Blackberry pioneered the same business model that Google and Apple are doing now—that has not ended well for Blackberry.

Baker’s argument is that BlackBerry’s emphasis on privacy made it a tough sell in countries like Russia, China, and India. He added that employers should be able to relate since most of them probably don’t want to be completely locked out of their employees’ communications.

“Tech companies are picking a big public fight with the NSA because it looks good, as opposed to changing the ability of government to get data,” Baker said. “The crypto wars have about as much to do with the outcome of security as the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939 had to do with the outcome of WW2.” (The crypto wars involve private individuals and organizations attempting to implement secure encryption while governments work to undermine this encrypton or demand backdoors.)

Prince shot back that the companies need to take steps to gain back user trust in the wake of last year’s Snowden revelations, and added that interest in widespread vulnerabilities like Heartbleed and Poodle shows that individuals are ready to engage about privacy.

Given all of the weird/extremely ill-advised business decisions BlackBerry made in terms of ignoring trends and failing to produce products consumers wanted during its decline, it seems strange to call out a strong stance on encryption as the thing that brought the company to its knees. But perhaps Baker knows something we don’t about what happens to companies that don’t give the NSA a backdoor into their user data. 

After what felt like the fleetingist of summers, here’s the news that snowophobes have been bracing for since the last polar vortex: It looks like winter is coming early this year.

It’s only the first week of November, and America has already had two record-breaking snowstorms. Considering Columbia, South Carolina, beat Boston, New York City, and Fargo (yes, Fargo) for the first 1-inch snowfall of the season, we may be in for another weird winter.

Over the last few weeks, seasonal climate models have shifted more and more toward the idea that this winter will be a doozy. Now that we’re within shorter range, the odds of recurring cold snaps—at least for the rest of November—are increasingly certain. Over the last few days, shorter-term weather models have locked on to the growing likelihood that—for the Eastern United States, at least—winter starts now.

A wintery East Coast may be hastened by one of the strongest storms on Earth in 2014, Super Typhoon Nuri, set to morph into a Bering Sea extratropical cyclone over the next few days.

According to the National Weather Service, the remnants of another Pacific cyclone, Hurricane Ana, was partly responsible for the snows in South Carolina this past weekend. Ana made a close brush with Hawaii last month before turning toward the Pacific Northwest.

There are other long-range signals that continue to point toward a particularly cold November, like the continued unseasonably large extent of Eurasian snow cover, a predicted burst of warming in the stratosphere, and a “ridge bridge” pattern that typically allows far northern Arctic air to spill southward toward the East Coast. All these signals point toward instability in a building dome of very cold air over the North Pole that could pour southward at any moment.

Here’s what’s coming next week, for example:

For the Twin Cities, that means next Wednesday’s high temperature may top out below 20 degrees—the normal high for the last week of January, usually the coldest part of the year. The recently upgraded GFS model and the European ECMWF model are both showing a similar pattern intermittently for at least the next few weeks.

The flip side of this pattern, as with last year, is abnormal warmth for the West. The same general pattern has been recurring for more than a year now and has been blamed for worsening the California drought and pushing that state toward its warmest year on record. A recent study led by a Stanford researcher showed the pattern was at least three times more likely to form because of global warming.

Aiding in this pattern is an unusual warming of the Pacific Ocean, just off the West Coast. The region currently features the warmest waters in decades, according to the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang.

Since last winter, the science linking extreme winter weather with climate change has strengthened. Studies in May and June said wavier jet stream patterns are occurring more frequently in a warming world. In September the author of a new paper on the subject called the recent occasional destabilization of the polar vortex a “side effect of global warming.”

Are late-night first-person shooter binges not enough? Do you crave experiencing that action on the big screen, instead of your living room? Do you wish that rather than seeing Tom Cruise’s dreamy (and slightly unhinged) green eyes, you could see through them? Well, you’re in luck. As the video above shows, first-person-perspective action movies might eventually be a very real thing.

The clip comes courtesy of an Indiegogo campaign that’s raising post-production funding for what it calls “the first ever action POV feature film.” Directed by Ilya Naishuller, the film, Hardcore, stars Sharlto Copley of District 9 fame (as the sidekick, not the “first person,” obviously) in what would best be described as a sci-fi revenge flick set in Moscow. The clip is intense, and the thought of sitting through 90-plus minutes of that type of action seems daunting, but it’s admittedly pretty awesome.

As it’s filmed “almost entirely on a GoPro,” with various stuntmen donning camera-mounted head gear, you might recognize Naishuller’s directorial work—and the POV action movie conceit—from the video for Russian indie band Biting Elbows’ single “Bad Motherfucker,” which went uber-viral last year. It was that punching-and-kicking-heavy (not to mention ingenious) take on the music video that caught the attention of director Timur Bekmambetov, who offered to produce a Naishuller-directed feature film.

While the project apparently took some convincing on Bekmambetov’s part (Naishuller himself initially feared the general premise was too gimmicky), the movie is nearly complete, now just a little less than $200,000 shy of hitting the theaters.

To learn more about the production (or to donate some cash), you can visit the Indiegogo page. In the meantime, enjoy envisioning a world in which you get a little bit closer to seeing things through the eyes of your favorite ass-kicking movie star.

A new proposal may make it a little bit harder to get off the mobile grid in Wyoming’s national parks. The National Parks Service is now in talks with a Louisiana-based company called CenturyLink to lay $34 million worth of fiber optic line through Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, improving mobile connectivity and speed. The plans come as the NPS gets ready for a “Go Digital” promotional campaign complete with its own hashtag (#NationalParks) to celebrate its 100^th anniversary in 2016. 

Yellowstone has had a cellphone and Wi-Fi plan since 2009, though coverage is spotty, and expansion of coverage through fiber optic wiring would make Yellowstone’s existing technological offerings more effective. QR codes in visitor booklets can be scanned to link to an online trip planner, and apps have been developed by private companies to alert users to nearby wildlife, though only where there is cell service.

Earlier this year, Canada announced similar plans to equip 15 to 20 remote sites with high-speed Internet, with the possibility of expanding to a total of 75 over the next three years if the first round goes well. A representative of Parks Canada told AFP such measures make sense for an increasingly urbanized Canada, saying that “for young people from cities, things are different.” The desire to cater to increasingly plugged-in visitors was echoed by an NPS representative last summer, when the service announced a pilot program to expand cell coverage in five national parks, hoping to explore how the NPS can enhance the visitor experiences of “new audiences who rely on smartphones and tablets to connect them to the things that are important to them.” Possible features include text message weather alerts and access to online information about park features. At the time, a Park Service spokesman said that expanded Wi-Fi could also cut costs by digitizing materials that need to be printed and distributed. Visitor centers, too, have begun to be phased into the digital space to save money.

One of the biggest advocates for these changes is the National Park Hospitality Association, a business trade group representing hotels and restaraunts on National Park grounds. which was behind a recent temporary installation of Wi-Fi at the Grand Canyon. It was shortly after the NPHA released a set of recommendations advocating for expanded cell service in parks and highlighting the value of connectivity that the NPS first launched its pilot program to expand coverage last year. For the NPHA, expanding Wi-Fi also offers the money-making opportunity of concessionaires charging visitors additional fees for accessing Web content beyond just the park website. Cell providers, another obvious advocate for expanded coverage in parks, argue better service improves safety through enabling easier communication between rangers and first responders, and that mobile apps could help users more fully explore plant and animal life.

The Yellowstone plans and others like them have garnered ire from interest groups like Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, who filed a public records request for documents on the plans and whose director has said that the long-neglected infrastructure needs of the National Parks—“everything from sewers to roads to bridges to collapsing visitors centers, crumbling restrooms”—should take precedence over tech upgrades. The troubled financial status of America’s national parks is well-documented, and though officials haven’t indicated they would be the ones to cover the installation, a spokeswoman from CenturyLink has said that costs would have to be covered by the Park Service and the companies who would benefit from the service areas in order to make financial sense for CenturyLink in such remote areas. Whether better reception will help or hinder park visitors looking to heed the call of the wild is still an open question.