 |
|
|
|||||
Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’ latest season of her reality show, With Love, Meghan, drops today on Netflix. In line with the streamers strategy for its flagship programs, all eight episodes are available to binge immediately. Its a strategy that serves journalists well, offering plenty of controversial moments to highlight from a celebrity whose ties to the U.K. royal family continue to generate headlines. But it also underscores how approaches to consuming content have changed. Historically, TV shows aired new episodes week after week, creating appointment viewing. With the streaming era, that model shiftedthough Netflix remains unique in its commitment to releasing entire seasons at once, according to recent analysis by Ampere Analysis, a research company. Some 84% of Netflixs original TV releases are full-season drops, compared with 60% on Disney+, 57% on Peacock, and only 34% on Apple TV+. HBO Max is the least likely to release entire seasons, with just 28% of its programming arriving all at once. Netflix rose to prominence with this facilitating binge viewing model, and its what a lot of Netflix audience has come to expect with their new favorite shows coming out, says Rahul Patel, principal analyst at Ampere Analysis. Beyond audience expectations, practical considerations also drive the approach. Netflix has always done the binge strategy, says Kasey Moore, founder of Whats on Netflix, which tracks the platforms new releases. Thats largely due to the sheer volume of its output. Its because the amount of shows and movies that theyre putting out, he says. The scale of Netflixs operations prevents it from devoting marketing efforts to weekly episode drops. Instead, releasing entire seasons at once allows for large-scale promotion of specific titles. Apple TV+ is a really good example where they just don’t have that volume of output, Moore adds. He once tried to map out in a spreadsheet how Netflix could release everything weekly but found dozens and dozens of shows overlapping, making it impractical. Only 2% of Netflix programming is released weekly, compared with 33% on HBO Max, according to Ampere Analysis. Scale, Patel agrees, is central to Netflixs strategy. Netflix is releasing content at such a high frequency that when it comes to considering churn mitigation, its essentially the subsequent big release thats coming out in two, three, or four weeks time thats keeping subscribers engaged with the service, he says. Expecting viewers to wait six to eight weeks for a full season is unrealistic for Netflix. By contrast, Disney+, with far fewer releases, experiments with alternative models. Roughly one in four of its shows drop multiple episodes per week, though not full seasons. Amazon’s Prime Video employs a similar approach, balancing stacked premieres with weekly episodes. According to Patel, Netflixs incumbency enables its all-at-once model in a way rivals cannot match. Subscribers often factor a Netflix subscription into their monthly expenses, while newer streamers must actively keep users engaged across billing cycles. If a subscriber is joining for a particular show, they might need to stay subscribed for the following nine weeks, for the rest of the run, Patel explains. In an alternative world, if that show was released all in one go, thats an instance where they could binge watch across a weekend or a couple of weeks, and then perhaps churn from the service. Whether Netflixs big drop approach actually works remains debated. It depends who you’re looking at, says Moore. Netflix is always Netflix first, rather than basing itself on any individual show, but I’m not sure you could say that about some of its rivals anymore. For competitors, the brand image is more closely tied to individual programs. With a lot of these services, the brand image is obviously very important, and a lot of that does come from the content and the type of content they have, Patel says.
Category:
E-Commerce
China is taking a page from abandoned NASA research in an effort to leave the United States far behind in a new weapon category that the Pentagon believes will be crucial for military supremacy in the near future. Beijings engineers have reportedly designed a hypersonic aircraft carrieressentially a large, super fast drone mothership that can deploy several more drones. It uses an variable oblique wing, a historic, experimental design that has one single wing that rotates depending on the aircrafts speed rather than fixed classical symmetrical wings in traditional planes. To laymen used to regular aircraft it may look bananas, but the Chinese engineers believe that the designoriginally created by Nazi engineers and continued by the U.S. in the second half of the 20th centurysolves some of the key problems of hypersonic flight. This will not be the first flying aircraft carrier. China has already built the Jiu Tian, a subsonic mothership capable of deploying a hundred combat drones. But it’s poised to be much faster than anything we’ve seen. According to defense experts, hypersonic flight is the key for the war of the future. While many intercontinental ballistic missiles fly at more than five times the speed of soundthe definition of hypersonic flightthey follow a predictable ballistic curve trajectory that make them easy to intercept for anti-air weapons like the Patriot batteries. But vehicles like this hypersonic craft will fly in unpredictable manners, like a regular airplane. That combination of speed and flying pattern makes them virtually impossible to intercept. Effectively, this will enable this new Chinese aircraft to cross U.S. defenses carrying combat drones in its belly. Once this happens, it will be free to launch swarms of these drones to destroy key enemy infrastructure in the first minutes of a war. Firing on all cylinders It’s not the first time that China has snatched American weaponry designs. Decades ago, China systematically copied both U.S. and Russia’s devices to try to match their military prowess. In the last few years, however, Beijing has poured billions into university research labs, private companies, and its defense industry in a coordinated effort to turn the People’s Liberation Army into the most powerful and advanced force in the world by 2049. China has have already leapfrogged the U.S. military in many regards, from advanced sixth-generation combat jets to hypersonic weapons that have no match in the American arsenal. One is their orbital hypersonic bombardment vehicle, a hypersonic glider capable of launching hypersonic missiles from low orbit. When its test was first detected by American agencies, then-Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Hyten said that it defies the laws of physics. The test was classified by General Mark Milley, then-chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, as close to a Sputnik moment, drawing a parallel to the nation-shocking Soviet Unions achievement of placing the first satellite in space in 1957. More recently, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that Chinese hypersonic missiles are capable of sinking all of the U.S. Navy’s nuclear aircraft carriers “in five minutes,” claiming that the U.S. loses all the Pentagon’s combat simulations against the Chinese army. A future built upon the past But even as China develops its own new wonder weapons, the Chinese havent stopped drawing inspiration from classic American breakthroughs to move forward, revisiting projects that the United States once deemed impossible for technical or economic reasons. Their aim: to discover new machines that will give them the upper hand against Washington in the event of a conflict. We’ve already seen several prime examples of this trend, like China’s railgunsfuturistic electromagnetic cannons capable of firing solid metal projectiles at hypersonic speeds up to 105 miles away using rails powered by massive electromagnets (a line of research abandoned by the U.S. Navy). Another example is China’s oblique detonation engine, once an American invention from 1958 that promised aircraft capable of flying at sixteen times the speed of soundabout 12,000 mphbut was shelved when engineers failed to resolve its technical challenges. China has also deburred a design for a new hypersonic commercial and military aircraft that NASA left unfinished in the 1990s. Now, China’s latest borrowed design is the oblique wing aircraft, a concept abandoned by the NASA in 1982. It’s getting a second life thanks to Beijings seemingly unlimited funding, and new computer tools that will make it possible according to this new work led by a team from Northwestern Polytechnical University that was published by Professor Ma Yiyuan in Advances in Aeronautical Science and Engineering in July. The AD-1 aircraft in flight with its wing swept at 60 degrees, the maximum sweep angle. [Photo: NASA] Hypersonic carriers for combat drone deployment The team has reimagined the oblique rotating wing to create a hypersonic unmanned mother shipa near-space platform capable of Mach 5 flight that can dispatch drone swarms behind enemy lines. The proposed carrier operates at the edge of space (about 19 miles above Earth), carries up to 4,400 pounds of payload, and is designed to launch from 16 to 18 autonomous drones for rapid attacks on key enemy infrastructure, such as communication hubs, radars, and command centers, before air defenses can respond. After the strike, the aircraft would return and land under fully autonomous control. The role of the oblique wing in this design is to solve one of aviation’s thorniest problems: How to achieve stable, efficient flight from takeoff at hypersonic speeds? Unlike conventional aircraftwith their symmetrical swing-wing designsthe Chinese proposal centers a single wing that rotates up to 90 degrees. At low speeds, the wing is perpendicular for max lift. As speed ramps up, the wing pivots to 45 degrees, redistributing airflow and suppressing shock wave formation. At Mach 5, the wing aligns with the fuselage and merges into the top of the aircraft, transforming the entire vehicle into a “waverider”basically a missile that breathes air and minimizes drag at hypersonic cruise speeds. At this point, the fuselage itself produces 67% of the lift, with the canards and the tail surfaces providing the rest via shock-induced pressure differences. The scientists claim this design achieves unprecedented aerodynamic efficiency in hypersonic travel. Ma and his colleagues write in the research paper: Compared to mainstream morphing configurations such as variable-sweep wings, the oblique wing aircraft features a relatively simpler structural design. The wing remains a single integrated component, and the wing box located at the centre of the configuration stays intact, providing significantly better load-bearing performance than conventional variable-geometry designs. They also say that this architecture holds an advantage in structural strength. But while simpler in structure, the design confronts severe engineering demands. The critical transonic transitionMach 0.8 to 1.2creates shifting shock waves along the wing, moving the aerodynamic center forward and potentially causing dangerous nose-down pitches that could make the craft uncontrollable. Here, the research highlights the need for a sophisticated array of control surfaces: nose-mounted canards and a high-mounted tailplane, which regulate downwash, front lift, and nose-up moments, all while vertical stabilizers actively manage roll and yaw as shock waves evolve. This design was discovered thanks to computerized fluid dynamic analysis and AI tools that NASAand obviously the Nazisdidnt have at the time. Which is why the oblique wing was ahead of its time but it wont be forever, as an unnamed spacecraft designer tells the Taiwanese newspaper South China Morning Post. Things like real-time strain monitoring, microsecond diagnostics, and fail-safe locking mechanisms for the wings central shaft will be key to handle the severe torque loads (the force that strains the fuselage and wing), thermal gradients (the temperature differences from the air particles friction at increased speed), and the general structural fatigue that arise in hypersonic flight. Nazi Germany and NASA paved the way As forementioned, the oblique wing isnt a new dream. German engineers first sketched the concept during World War II. Richard Vogt, working at Blohm & Voss, designed the P.202a jet fighter whose wing rotated obliquely, one side forward and the other back, balancing aerodynamic forces and aiming for a sweet spot between high-speed efficiency and low-speed lift. Though never built or flown, the design set the template for future asymmetric wing studies. After the war, Dr. Vogt and the oblique wing theory crossed the Atlantic. American aeronautical engineer Robert T. Jones picked up the concept in the 1950s, conducting a series of analytical and wind tunnel studies at NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor for NASA) Ames Research Center in California. These investigations revealed that a transport-size oblique-wing aircraft, flying at speeds up to Mach 1.4, would exhibit significantly improved aerodynamic efficiency compared to conventional aircraft designs. By the 1970s, Jones and his colleagues moved from theory to hands-on experimentation. NASA built the Oblique Wing Research Aircraft, an uncrewed propeller-driven testbed, and later a small remote-controlled demonstrator aircraft with a 20-foot wingspan that flew once, demonstrating stable flight with wing sweeps from 35 to 50 degrees. These testbeds showed promise in drag reduction and fuel efficiency, but at high sweep angles, they exhibited unpleasant flight characteristics and pronounced roll-coupling modes, foreshadowing the challenges that would later surface. The AD-1 oblique wing research aircraft was photographed during a wing sweep test flight. The aircraft was flown 79 times during the research program conducted at NASA Dryden between 1979 and 1982. [Photo: NASA] The effort culminated in the only crewed aircraft to use the concept: the NASA AD-1 (Ames-Dryden-1), delivered to Dryden (now Armstrong) Flight Research Center in 1979. The AD-1 was built with a low-speed, low-cost philosophythe design specified by NASA and detailed by Rutan Aircraft Factory. Constructed of plastic reinforced with fiberglass and a foam core, the squat aircraft had a fixed tricycle landing gear and was powered by two small Microturbo turbojets. It was limited to speeds of about 170 mph for safety reasons. Over ts three-year flight program (1979-1982), the AD-1 made 79 flights, its unique wing pivoting incrementally from zero to a full 60 degrees. The pilot would control the sweep using an electrically-driven gear mechanism inside the fuselage. Data collected throughout the envelope expansion revealed that, although the oblique wing was mechanically viable, significant challenges emergedespecially at sweep angles above 45 degrees. The aircraft developed problems that led to poor handling qualities and sometimes precarious flight behavior. The fiberglass structures limited stiffness exacerbated these tendencies, making improved control systems and stiffer materials a necessity for any future higher-speed designs. NASA retired the AD-1 after fulfilling its research objectives. The aircraft never went beyond subsonic trials or into larger commercial or military applications, remaining an exhibition piece at the Hiller Aviation Museum in California. Subsequent plans for larger, transonic and supersonic oblique-wing aircraftincluding airliners and DARPAs Switchblade demonstrator created with Northrop Grummanwere canceled before reaching full realization, as engineers assessed that the control and structural challenges remained unsolved with then-existing technology. Why China believes it will succeed Despite these historical setbacks, Chinas engineers argue that todays advancescomputational fluid dynamics, artificial intelligence, and smart materialscan finally make the oblique wing workable for high-speed strategic aircraft. The engineering challenges at the core of the design are immense. The wing pivot shafta single hinge connecting the rotating wing to the fuselagemust endure tremendous bending moments during high-speed flight, often beyond the endurance of conventional aerospace materials. Torque demands increase with the square of velocity, and the motors that drive the wing must overcome significant aerodynamic resistance, particularly as speed climbs. At Mach 5, leading-edge temperatures exceed 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, while the shaft remains inside the cooler fuselage, resulting in severe thermal gradients and stressing lubrication systems. Fatigue from repeated stress cycles poses another threat, risking microscopic cracks or catastrophic failure if the shaft breaches the pressurized cabin. To address these risks, the Chinese team emphasizes redundancy: multiple backup systems, real-time strain monitoring, microsecond-level diagnostics, and fail-safe locking mechanisms designed to freeze the wing in a safe position should any fault emerge. Combined with self-regulating smart structures and rapid-response flight control electronics, these measures form the technological bedrock for Chinas efforts to finally realize the oblique wings potential as a next-generation strategic weapon. If they succeed, China wouldnt be just resurrecting abandoned American experiments or Nazi-era ambitions for the sake of academic ego. It can really give them a huge edge against the U.S. By transforming the oblique wing into a hypersonic drone carrier, Beijing aims to deliver a new kind of strategic weaponone designed to outpace and outmaneuver anything the Pentagon can field in the race for future military supremacy. Even if China fails to make it happen, the research highlights how America is getting more and more behind Beijing. Chinese aerospace engineers have recaptured the daring spirit of the supersonic 50s and the Apollo program, coming up with new ideas and remaking old ones into new designs that the American industryfocused on quarterly reports, shareholder value, and convoluted Pentagon contractsare simply not considering anymore.
Category:
E-Commerce
Agentic AI is being heralded as the future of the generative AI revolution by leaders in the field. From ChatGPT’s integration of agentic features to the rise of Comet (the agent-based web browser from Perplexity) and Chinese-born Manus, the trend of handing more control to AI tools seems inevitable. At least, thats the view of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. But before ceding control completely, its worth weighing the risks. If AI agents are about to flood society, they must first get street-smart. Initial concerns point to their naivety, which could come back to hurt us all. Andy Zou, a researcher at Gray Swan AI, an IT security firm, says AI agents have only become prevalent in the past few months, as the focus has shifted from just talking to the chatbot to giving it tools that can take real-world actionsdramatically increasing the risks. The concern, he notes, is that agentic AI resembles the Hollywood caricature of George of the Jungle: ready to believe anything, no matter the consequences. We found you can essentially manipulate the AI [to] override its programming, Zou says. In a new study, Zou and colleagues tested 22 leading mainstream AI agents with 1.8 million prompt injection attacks, around 60,000 of which successfully pushed the agents off their guardrails to grant unauthorized data access, conduct illicit financial transactions, and bypass regulatory compliance. An earlier study showed even weaker defenses, with AI assistants fooled nearly 70% of the time into wiring money to fraudsters via buried fine print instructions. And just this week, browser developer Brave alleged that a similar website-based attack could manipulate Perplexitys Comet browser. (Perplexity has since patched the flaw, though Brave contends the fix is incomplete.) The lesson is clear: Even modest success rates at this scale translate into dangerous vulnerabilities. Before handing these bots the keys, theyll need sharper critical thinking. This isnt merely hypothetical. One cryptocurrency user lost $50,000 when an AI agent was tricked into sending funds to the wrong wallet through malicious, agent-only instructions. As adoption growseight in 10 corporations now use some form of agentic AI, according to PricewaterhouseCoopersthe risks multiply. Tianshi Li, an assistant professor at Northeastern University who led the earlier study, says agents are designed to complete complex tasks for people, often without direct supervision. While theyre useful for tedious work, Li warns that this capability of doing complex things without direct supervision is also inherently conflicting with security and privacy guarantees. Unlike static chatbots, AI agents are vulnerable because their inputs dont come solely from the userthey interact with tools and pull data from untrusted sources, creating hidden risks. The agent goes out there and talks to a tool, retrieves data from a source that you dont fully trust, [and] without realizing it, you might be exposing yourself to some of these risks, says Matt Fredrikson, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University and Zous coauthor on the study. With focused effort, Zou and Fredrikson managed to compromise agents from 10 frontier AI labs within hours. Security engineers wont be surprised: Treating anything an agent reads on the webor in a calendar invite, email signature, or PDFas trustworthy effectively gives strangers partial control of the system prompt. But the ease of these breaches should be a wake-up call. Theyre putting the agents out there in the real world, Zou says. And there are so many of these real vulnerabilities that exist right now. Enterprise adoption reflects both curiosity and caution. James Robinson, chief information security officer at Netskope, a cloud security firm that recently published guidance on AI agent risks, says companies are experimenting carefully. Agents are just starting to be played with, he tells Fast Company. For now, they arent given full open control [to] make production changes, but are confined to centralized environments such as IDEs [integrated development environments], with guardrails like change control and peer review. In highly regulated industries such as banking, the restrictions are even tighter. Still, Robinson warns against casual adoption, comparing it with having an employee that joins your organization that you never hiredsomeone with 24/7 access to potentially everything you see. Experts share Robinson’s concern that many adopters dont grasp how easily agents can be manipulated or how severe the fallout could be. Fredrikson, the Carnegie Mellon professor, adds that while some organizations do their due diligence, there are some that arent fully aware of all the mitigations and security tools they could use. The imbalance remains clear: Promoters emphasize the benefits of agentic AI far louder than the risks. People are excited to deploy this, and things move very quickly, Fredrikson says. That’s a mix that feels like a recipe for security issues to come out of the woodwork, he warns. This story was supported by a grant from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||