A retired University of Pennsylvania professor, Carolyn Marvin, was arrested this week for blocking an Uber Eats delivery robot on a Philadelphia street. She was not charged for obstructing the robot. She was charged for refusing a lawful police order to move. The legal question of whether impeding a commercially operating robot violates any statute remains unresolved, but Marvin's repeated use of this tactic as protest now has a documented law enforcement consequence.
NASA's Perseverance rover crossed 28.10 miles (45.22 km) on its odometer, edging past Opportunity's record of 28.06 miles (45.16 km) to become the most traveled rover in solar system history. Curiosity, which has been operating on Mars for over a decade longer, does not hold the record because its scientific mission routed it differently. MapQuest, separately, added a 'Surveillance Layer' to its mobile app that maps known license plate readers and cameras, sourcing data at minimum from OpenStreetMap, with possible integration from privacy tools like DeFlock.
A Christie's auction for a physical carrier pigeon datagram, sent in 2001 by Norway's Bergen Linux User Group as part of an IP-over-avian-carrier experiment, closed at $20,480, nearly seven times the $3,000 estimate. The original item is a framed printout of an actual transmitted data packet. Read the full piece for the Christie's auction listing details and the specific context on why Perseverance's mission geometry produced more distance than Curiosity's decade-plus of operation.
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