In today’s Bull dog wrapup of technology and science news:

  • Amazon unveils its Prime delivery fleet of jet aircraft
  • Facebook tries again to tackle “clickbait”
  • Apple offers “bug bounties” to people reporting bugs
  • A private company wins OK for moon flight
  • Dish offers a non-ESPN option

The details:

  • Amazon unveils cargo plane as it expands delivery network

Seattle-based Amazon is unveiling its first branded cargo plane, one of 40 jetliners that will make up the e-commerce giant’s own air transportation network as it takes more control of its delivery process.

The latest push to speed delivery of its products comes as the company ships an increasing number of packages worldwide. Amazon’s parcel volume was an estimated 1 billion packages in 2015 — the same number that FedEx delivered three years earlier for hundreds of thousands of customers.

Amazon has had issues with the reliability of air freight services. In 2013, it offered refunds to customers who got their Christmas orders late after bad weather and a jump in online shopping caused delays for UPS and FedEx.

Analysts say it makes sense for Amazon to use an air fleet it controls as another way to get its products to online shoppers drawn to fast, no-extra-cost delivery.

“They’re such a big online retailer,” said Satish Jindel, president of shipping consultant ShipMatrix. “There’s so much volume that if you have to add transportation for yourself, why would you pay a retail price when you can get wholesale? It makes sense.”

On Friday afternoon the company’s first branded “Prime Air” cargo plane, designatedAmazon One, will buzz over Seattle’s Lake Washington, just before the Navy’s Blue Angels take to the skies, a company official said.

Amazon leased 40 Boeing jets from Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings and Air Transport Services Group Inc., which will operate the air cargo network. Eleven of the planesalready are delivering packages for Amazon’s annual Prime loyalty program, which offers free two-day shipping and other perks. The remaining freighters will be rolled out in the next couple of years.

Aircraft like Amazon One allow the company to “continue to maintain our fast deliveryspeeds and lower our costs as our Prime base and our Prime member growth continue to soar,” said Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide operations.

Despite its growing fleet of aircraft, Amazon said it plans to continue to use FedEx, UPS and other transportation partners.

  • Facebook battles ‘clickbait’

Facebook is taking another stab at ridding users’ news feeds of “clickbait,” the links and headlines that ask readers to “guess what happened next” but don’t provide any useful information, tempting people to click if they want to find out anything.

The world’s largest social media company last tried this in 2014, when it announced that it was improving users’ news feed to help them find what was “interesting and relevant” and weed out “spammy” stories.

It looks like that didn’t work as well as it should have.

Facebook Inc. said on Thursday it is now using a system that identifies phrases commonly used in “clickbait” headlines. These range from “… and his reaction was priceless!” to “… What happens next is hard to believe.”

It will also consider items “clickbait” if a headline exaggerates information or is misleading. For example, Facebook notes that the headline “Apples Are Actually Bad For You?!” is misleading because apples are only bad if you eat too many of them every day.

From there, Facebook built a system that determines what phrases are commonly used in clickbait headlines that are not used in other headlines.

“This is similar to how many email spam filters work,” wrote Alex Peysakhovich, research scientist, and Kristin Hendrix, user experience researcher, in a blog post.

Links from websites and Facebook pages that are consistently posting clickbait will appear lower in users’ news feeds, so they are less likely to be seen. If a site stops posting such headlines, though, Facebook’s software will learn this, too, and the links will appear higher up.

Will this new system work? It’s possible, though just as some spammers continue to evade spam filters, some clickbait factories are likely to continue getting aroundFacebook’s anti-clickbait formulas.

  • Apple to offer cash for reporting security flaws

Apple says it will start offering cash rewards of up to $200,000 to hackers who come forward with information about security flaws in the company’s software.

The iPhone maker is joining other big tech companies that offer so-called “bug bounties” to people who discover vulnerabilities in their computer code. The goal is to encourage individuals to come forward so the company can fix the problem — and to discourage hackers from exploiting the flaw or selling the information to others.

Google, Facebook and others have long offered such rewards. To start, Apple says it willoffer rewards to a limited number of researchers it has worked with before, but it may expand the program.

Apple announced the program at a computer security conference in Las Vegas.

  • Fly me to the moon: Feds OK private firm’s lunar flight plan

The federal government for the first time has given permission to a private Florida company to fly a spaceship beyond Earth’s orbit and land on the moon.

The Federal Aviation Administration gave clearance Wednesday to Moon Express to land a washing machine-sized vehicle on the moon that would take hops across the lunarsurface using engine firings instead of roving on wheels.

“Why crawl when you can fly,” said Moon Express CEO Bob Richards. He called the company’s planned lunar ship a “single-stage hot rod of space.”

The Cape Canaveral-based Moon Express plans to launch late next year, probably out of New Zealand, on a rocket that has yet to fly, Richards said. The $10 million flight is the first of many planned missions where they hope to make money extracting lunarresources, like platinum, and selling moon dust and rock collectibles, he said.

Getting the OK — not technically a license but a determination that it would do no harm and the company can go ahead — “is a milestone and it is not implausible that they will succeed,” said retired space policy expert John Logsdon of George Washington University.

The company, is also competing with several other groups for the Google Lunar X Prize . The $20 million prize will go to the first private firm to get a lander to the moon that can then move a bit. But Richards said that’s not the main way the firm hopes to make money.

Richards said the first flight has five customers, including a company that is selling the opportunity to take people’s ashes to the moon. His parents’ ashes will be on the flight. He said they used to sing the song “Fly Me To The Moon” to him “and I’m going to.” The company uses a Diana Krall recording of the song for its telephone hold music.

  • Dish relegates ESPN to an add-on

Dish Network is offering a new “skinny” bundle of about 50 cable channels that doesn’t include ESPN and some other sports channels, giving people who don’t care about sports a way to save money on TV without joining the ranks of “cord cutters.”

Sports channels are among the most expensive for cable and satellite TV companies and are usually included in big cable bundles. That drives up the bill for all customers, whether they enjoy watching ball games or not.

Dish’s new “Flex Pack” starts at $30 a month, not including fees and taxes, while a big cable bundle typically costs about $90.

Dish is not the first cable distributor to sell a smaller basic cable bundle without ESPN, however.

Comcast has done so for nearly a decade. And Dish’s package is similar to Verizon Fios’ “Custom TV” when it launched in April 2015. Verizon also made ESPN (and lots of other channels) add-ons to a smaller cable bundle. Then ESPN sued and other programmers protested. Custom TV was revamped in February to two core bundles, one sports-focused and one not, with fewer options for groups of channels to add.

Custom TV has “been diluted pretty badly” since those changes, said Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson Research. Verizon spokesman Ray McConville says the revised version of Custom TV is more popular and changes were made in response to customer feedback rather than programmer demands. Verizon settled with ESPN in May.