TLDR 2021-01-27

Alexa will now be able to proactively act on Hunches thanks to its latest update. Amazon's device has been able to sense habits and ask about them since 2018, but it had to ask for permission before acting. Users will be able to select the types of Hunches that Alexa can complete on its own. Amazon is also rolling out a security subscription service and an energy dashboard for the Alexa app. A one-minute video from Amazon about proactive Hunches is available in the article.

Twitter has acquired Revue, a Dutch startup that lets users publish and monetize email newsletters. Revue serves major publishers like Vox Media and The Markup. While newsletters might not be an obvious fit for Twitter's platform, it would make it easier for writers to connect to subscribers while giving them a way to receive additional income. Revue already supports paid subscriptions. It will continue to operate as a standalone product. Revue's pro features are now free for all users and the fee for paid newsletters has been lowered to 5%.

The first private space station crew will be three men who are paying $55 million each for the experience. They will spend eight days at the International Space Station, after spending one or two days aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule. Russia has been selling rides to the ISS since 2011. Other companies like Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are also planning to take paying customers up to space. The crew will get 15 weeks of training and they will have to pass medical tests before the flight.

Paleontologists in Argentina have found a skeleton that might have come from a dinosaur that was more than 120 feet long. It may have been the largest land animal ever. The excavation started in 2012 with a hulking set of 24 vertebrae and bits of the pelvis and pectoral girdle. It is likely a type of long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur called a titanosaur. The specimen is around 98 million years old.

CDK is an open-sourced container penetration toolkit that offers stable exploitation in different slimmed containers without any OS dependency. It can gather information inside a container to find and exploit potential weaknesses. CDK contains network-tools and APIs for TCP/HTTP requests, tunnels, and K8s cluster management. A detailed list of its modules is available.

JerryScript is a lightweight JavaScript engine for resource-constrained devices. It is heavily optimized for low memory consumption and can run on devices with less than 64 KB of RAM and less than 200 KB of flash memory. JerryScript features a mature C API and it is easy to embed in applications.

A recent survey found that, out of the employees from the 42 tech companies who participated, 31% of them were only putting in three to four hours of work a day. The survey did not measure productivity, which can vary widely between people. Some companies are reportedly working their employees harder, but others report significantly less work. The pandemic has not impacted everyone equally.

Clash, a TikTok competitor, has purchased Byte, another TikTok competitor. The details of the purchase are still vague, but Clash's website now directs visitors to download Byte and the app is no longer available on the iOS App Store. Clash's co-founder says that the two apps will be released together as one product within a few months. The market for short-form video apps has become extremely saturated, and Clash will face a lot of competition. Byte was created to be a successor to Vine, but TikTok had blown up by the time it finally launched.