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Your WIRED daily briefing. Today, consumer drones appear to have been used in an attempt on the life of president Nicolás Maduro, a US bank has blamed a computer error for the repossession of 400 homes, Fortnite for Android will bypass the Google Play store and more.
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1. Drones used in assassination attempt on Venezuelan president Maduro
A pair of what appear to be consumer-grade drones have been shot down in a failed assassination attempt against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro (The Independent). Six people have been arrested over the incident, which involved two drones, each loaded with 1kg of C-4 plastic explosive, being flown towards the president has he attended a parade celebrating the 81st anniversary of the National Guard. Quoted in the Washington Post a bystander in a nearby apartment building said: "We saw the drone that looked like the size of half a bicycle. It came from the sky and we thought it was a boy playing with it." Maduro, the unpopular successor to the late Hugo Chávez, has shown increasingly authoritarian tendencies as Venezuela has come under harsh foreign sanctions.
2. Computer error responsible for mortgage repossessions, says US bank
US banking giant Wells Fargo has blamed a software error for 625 of its customers being denied mortgage modifications when faced with repossession (Gizmodo). 400 of them lost their homes as a result, and the error went unnoticed for five years. The bank says it is "very sorry that this error occurred" and that it's now "providing remediation" for affected customers, but has set aside only $8 million to do so, amounting to just $12,800 per household.
3. Fortnite for Android will bypass the Google Play store
When Epic's free-to-play multiplayer third-person battle royale hit Fortnite comes to Android, it won't be available via the Google Play store (The Register). Instead, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney tells Eurogamer, it will be distributed as a side-loaded APK file in order to avoid the Play Store's 30 per cent "store tax" on all payments – including microtransactions. This has raised security fears over the likelihood of malicious fakes being distributed, as well as opening a much-needed conversation into the fairness of Google's fee share, which eats into a significant amount of many games' potential profits after development costs.
4. The quest for animal-free food is reshaping what we call meat
Whether it’s a juicy hunk of steak, little crunchy bits of bacon or whatever it is they squeeze inside sausages, humans are generally agreed that ‘meat’ refers to anything that used to be attached to an animal but is now on a dinner plate (WIRED). But what about a burger that never saw the inside of a cow, or a chicken nugget grown inside a petri dish in a Californian lab? Are they still meat? The answer to that depends on who you ask. But as clean (or should that be lab-grown?) meat companies race to bring the first animal-free meat products to the US, the food industry is flipping semantic somersaults as it tries to decide how to refer to this new way of growing food.
5. Patrick Stewart to return as Star Trek's Picard
Sir Patrick Stewart has announced that he will be returning to Star Trek in a reprise of his role as Jean-Luc Picard (Ars Technica). He's to appear in a new, as-yet-unnamed series, set to stream on CBS All Access in North America. As there's no international version of channel, this implies that, as with Star Trek: Discovery, Netflix is likely to pick up broadcast rights for the rest of the world. Quoted by the official Star Trek Twitter feed, Stewart says that, in the new series, Picard "may not be a Captain anymore. He may be someone who has been changed by his experiences".
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
