My first check-in from the road to SCALE, some quick headlines, and the start to the big adventure.

Plus the Telegram outage, Google’s good news, and more.

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• Signal and Telegram are down for many users — You might want to move your private chats to WhatsApp or Telegram for the time being: it appears popular encrypted messenger Signal is currently down globally, according to numerous reports from users.
• Alexa has literally lost her voice as users report outages and unresponsiveness | TechCrunch — Amazon’s Alexa smart assistant seems to be down this morning. We’ve been hearing reports over the last hour of either delayed responses or just total loss of connection.
• Google Chrome: Flash Usage Declines from 80% in 2014 to Under 8% Today — The percentage of daily Chrome users who’ve loaded at least one page containing Flash content per day has gone down from around 80% in 2014 to under 8% in early 2018.
• SpaceX Fired A Rifle Into A Tank Of Helium To See If Someone Sabotaged Their Rocket | IFLScience — “We literally thought someone had shot the rocket,” CEO Elon Musk said in summer 2017, according to an excerpt from the book on The Washington Post. “We found things that looked like bullet holes, and we calculated that someone with a high-powered rifle, if they had shot the rocket in the right location, the exact same thing would have happened.”