Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need clues.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Wordle hints and answers, Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too.

Boeing’s first astronaut mission ended Friday night with an empty capsule landing and two test pilots still in space, left behind until next year because NASA judged their return too risky.

Six hours after departing the International Space Station, Starliner parachuted into New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range, descending on autopilot through the desert darkness.

It was an uneventful close to a drama that began with the June launch of Boeing’s long-delayed crew debut and quickly escalated into a dragged-out cliffhanger of a mission stricken by thruster failures and helium leaks. For months, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams’ return was in question as engineers struggled to understand the capsule’s problems.

Boeing insisted after extensive testing that Starliner was safe to bring the two home, but NASA disagreed and booked a flight with SpaceX instead. Their SpaceX ride won’t launch until the end of this month, which means they’ll be up there until February more than eight months after blasting off on what should have been a quick trip.

Wilmore and Williams should have flown Starliner back to Earth by mid-June, a week after launching in it. But their ride to the space station was marred by the cascade of thruster trouble and helium loss, and NASA ultimately decided it was too risky to return them on Starliner.

So with fresh software updates, the fully automated capsule left with their empty seats and blue spacesuits along with some old station equipment.

She’s on her way home, Williams radioed as the white and blue-trimmed capsule undocked from the space station 260 miles (420 kilometers) over China and disappeared into the black void.

Williams stayed up late to see how everything turned out. A good landing, pretty awesome, said Boeing’s Mission Control.

Cameras on the space station and a pair of NASA planes caught the capsule as a white streak coming in for the touchdown, which drew cheer.

There were some snags during reentry, including more thruster issues, but Starliner made a bull’s-eye landing, said NASA’s commercial crew program manager Steve Stich.

Even with the safe return, I think we made the right decision not to have Butch and Suni on board, Stich said at a news conference early Saturday. All of us feel happy about the successful landing. But then there’s a piece of us, all of us, that we wish it would have been the way we had planned it.

Boeing did not participate in the Houston news briefing. But two of the company’s top space and defense officials, Ted Colbert and Kay Sears, told employees in a note that they backed NASA’s ruling.

“While this may not have been how we originally envisioned the test flight concluding, we support NASA’s decision for Starliner and are proud of how our team and spacecraft performed,” the executives wrote.

Starliner’s crew demo capped a journey filled with delays and setbacks. After the space shuttles retired more than a decade ago, NASA hired Boeing and SpaceX for orbital taxi service. Boeing ran into so many problems on its first test flight with no one aboard in 2019 that it had to repeat it. The 2022 do-over uncovered even more flaws and the repair bill topped $1 billion.

SpaceX’s crew ferry flight later this month will be its 10th for NASA since 2020. The Dragon capsule will launch on the half-year expedition with only two astronauts since two seats are reserved for Wilmore and Williams for the return leg.

As veteran astronauts and retired Navy captains, Wilmore and Williams anticipated hurdles on the test flight. They’ve kept busy in space, helping with repairs and experiments. The two are now full-time station crew members along with the seven others on board.

Even before the pair launched on June 5 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, Starliner’s propulsion system was leaking helium. The leak was small and thought to be isolated, but four more cropped up after liftoff. Then five thrusters failed. Although four of the thrusters were recovered, it gave NASA pause as to whether more malfunctions might hamper the capsule’s descent from orbit.

Boeing conducted numerous thruster tests in space and on the ground over the summer, and was convinced its spacecraft could safely bring the astronauts back. But NASA could not get comfortable with the thruster situation and went with SpaceX.

Flight controllers conducted more test firings of the capsule’s thrusters following undocking; one failed to ignite. Engineers suspect the more the thrusters are fired, the hotter they become, causing protective seals to swell and obstruct the flow of propellant. They won’t be able to examine any of the parts; the section holding the thrusters was ditched just before reentry.

Starliner will be transported in a couple weeks back to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where the analyses will unfold.

NASA officials stressed that the space agency remains committed to having two competing U.S. companies transporting astronauts. The goal is for SpaceX and Boeing to take turns launching crews one a year per company until the space station is abandoned in 2030 right before its fiery reentry. That doesn’t give Boeing much time to catch up, but the company intends to push forward with Starliner, according to NASA.

Stich said post-landing it’s too early to know when the next Starliner flight with astronauts might occur.

It will take a little time to determine the path forward,” he said. 

Until now, the worst health care data breach occurred in 2015, which compromised 78.8 million people. But the ante has been upped.

The cyberattack in question has hit a new record of 100 million people affected — and just happens to have struck the largest health care company in the world (by revenue), UnitedHealth Group.

The actual incident happened in February 2024, when a ransomware attack caused disruptions at pharmacies all across the country, originally reported by Reuters. The target was Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group that manages finances for medical providers. Cybercriminals reportedly found their way into the Change Healthcare employee system due to a lack of multi-factor authentication on login credentials.

A statement from the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance described the nightmarish results of the hack, which involved prescriptions going unfilled, doctors and hospitals not getting paid, and insurance companies unable to reimburse medical providers. “The Change Healthcare hack is considered by many to be the biggest cybersecurity disruption to health care in American history,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, said in the committee statement.

Approximately a third of all U.S. citizens are somehow connected to the organization, and that includes lots and lots of personal data. We all knew it was bad at the time, as the CEO of Change Healthcare said the stolen files included the personal health data for “a substantial proportion of people in America,” as reported by TechCrunch.

The attack was claimed to have been committed by the BlackCat ransomware gang, which was confirmed by Change Healthcare. A post on the dark web by the Russia-based group later claimed to have stolen the health and patient information of millions of Americans.

But now, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has updated the figure of those affected in its data breach portal to reveal just how bad it really is: a terrifying 100 million people. One industry journal even suggested that the round figure of 100 million could change in the future, as reported by DailyMail. Hopefully that means the actual number could be smaller, but it could just as easily go in the opposite direction.

The sheer scale makes the 5.3 million data breach that affected Mexican health care systems reported on just yesterday look negligible by comparison.

NVIDIA GeForce NOW is gearing up to supply subscribers with the latest game in the Call of Duty franchise, as Black Ops 6 will be streamable on launch day. Now as with all GeForce NOW games, you still have to own the game through the respective PC client you plan to play on. Unless of course, that happens to be Xbox Game Pass, where you can play the game for free since it’s included with your Game Pass subscription.

This week is packed full of new titles for subscribers as NVIDIA adds 9 new games to the service in total. Although, to be fair, there are technically 10 new games since one of the 9 is the Xbox Game Pass version of Call of Duty HQ: which includes both Modern Warfare III and Warzone.

If Call of Duty isn’t your thing, don’t worry. There are plenty of other amazing games to stream starting today and tomorrow. Not the least of which is Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven from Square Enix.

GeForce NOW subscribers can stream Black Ops 6 from day one

While I won’t always recommend someone stream a game like the latest Call of Duty as opposed to playing it locally, it’s a pretty awesome capability in a pinch. Let’s say you want to play using your phone while you’re not at home. All you have to do is hook up a controller and launch the GeForce NOW mobile app. Simple. Plus it lets you play anywhere you have an internet connection.

It’s also nice if you have a less powerful PC yet you want to get better performance and graphics. This is especially the case with GeForce NOW Ultimate subscribers. Because they get to stream games off of GeForce RTX 4080 servers.

All of this can be done starting on October 25 as soon as the game goes live for everyone. And it doesn’t matter if you own the game on Steam, Battle.net, or through the Xbox app via purchase or the Xbox Game Pass subscription. All of those are available to stream through GeForce NOW.

Elder Scrolls Online players get a new reward

If you sub to GeForce NOW and you sub to Elder Scrolls Online, then you’re in for another treat. Because NVIDIA has a new reward for players. You’ll need to have opted into the GeForce NOW Rewards to claim the gift. If you fit into that category then you’ll be able to claim Stag-Heart Skull Sallet Hat as a cosmetic item. Which is apparently pretty rare.

You also need to make sure to claim the reward by November 24 or it disappears for good. So don’t miss out. As for this week’s remaining games, GeForce NOW is adding Worshippers of Cthulhu, No More Room In Hell 2, Windblown, DUCKSIDE, Off The Grid, and Selaco.