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Submission + - Northrop Grumman working with Musk's SpaceX on U.S. spy satellite system (reuters.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Aerospace and defense company Northrop Grumman is working with SpaceX, the space venture of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, on a classified spy satellite project already capturing high-resolution imagery of the Earth, according to people familiar with the program.
The program, details of which were first reported by Reuters last month, is meant to enhance the U.S. government's ability to track military and intelligence targets from low-Earth orbits, providing high-resolution imagery of a kind that had traditionally been captured mostly by drones and reconnaissance aircraft.

The inclusion of Northrop Grumman (NOC.N), opens new tab, which has not been previously reported, reflects a desire among government officials to avoid putting too much control of a highly-sensitive intelligence program in the hands of one contractor, four people familiar with the project told Reuters. "It is in the government's interest to not be totally invested in one company run by one person," one of the people said.

It's unclear whether other contractors are involved at present or could join the project as it develops. Spokespeople at Northrop Grumman and SpaceX didn't respond to requests for comment.
Northrop Grumman is providing sensors for some of the SpaceX satellites, the people familiar with the project told Reuters. Northrop Grumman, two of the people added, will test those satellites at its own facilities before they are launched.A t least 50 of the SpaceX satellites are expected at Northrop Grumman facilities for procedures including testing and the installation of sensors in coming years, one of the people said.
In March, Reuters reported that the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO, in 2021 awarded a $1.8 billion contract to SpaceX for the classified project, a planned network of hundreds of satellites. So far, the people familiar with the project said, SpaceX has launched roughly a dozen prototypes and is already providing test imagery to the NRO, an intelligence agency that oversees development of U.S. spy satellites.

Submission + - NASA scraps Mars sample return mission due to cost (bbc.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: The US space agency says the current mission design can't return the samples before 2040 on the existing funds and the more realistic $11bn (£9bn) needed to make it happen is not sustainable.

Nasa is going to canvas for cheaper, faster "out of the box" ideas.

It hopes to have a solution on the drawing board later in the year.

Returning rock samples from Mars is regarded as the single most important priority in planetary exploration, and has been for decades.

Just as the Moon rocks brought home by Apollo astronauts revolutionised our understanding of early Solar System history, so materials from the Red Planet are likely to recast our thinking on the possibilities for life beyond Earth.

But Nasa now acknowledges the way it's going about achieving the samples' return is simply unrealistic in the present fiscal environment.

"The bottom line is that $11bn is too expensive, and not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long," Nasa administrator Bill Nelson told reporters in a Monday teleconference.

The former US senator said he would not allow other agency science missions to be "cannibalised" by the Mars project.

Submission + - FCC Lets SpaceX Expand Testing of Cellular Starlink for Phones (pcmag.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: The FCC has given SpaceX regulatory clearance to start expanding tests of its cellular Starlink system in the US.

The FCC today issued an experimental license to SpaceX to test cellular Starlink in 10 more US locations; that comes after it granted licenses for two dozen other locations in December.

Originally, the FCC only granted SpaceX permission to test the cellular Starlink system in select cities, such as Mountain View, California; Dallas, Texas; and Pie Town, New Mexico. But now the commission is letting the company test the technology “state-wide” in California, Washington, Texas, and Hawaii.

In addition, SpaceX can conduct testing in Cape Canaveral, Florida; Whitmore Lake, Michigan; and Rock Creek, Colorado, among other locations.

The company is indicating the tests will see how the cellular Starlink system fares across various kinds of terrains. In a filing to the FCC earlier this month, SpaceX said: “Including these additional locations will enable SpaceX to more fully test its direct-to-cellular system, including beam-placement and topology software, in a variety of different geographic circumstances.”

In the meantime, the company’s initial tests have shown that the cellular Starlink satellites can successfully beam internet data to unmodified smartphones on the ground. This includes powering download speeds up to 17Mbps and even sending the internet data while the phone is under tree cover or even indoors. The technology’s goal is to serve cellular dead zones, making it possible for consumers to receive satellite connectivity in remote and rural areas.

Submission + - ISS battery might have crashed through a Florida home (qz.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Three years ago, NASA tossed a massive pallet of old batteries from the International Space Station (ISS), hoping that it would burn up through Earth’s atmosphere. A few weeks ago, the space station’s trash finally did reenter through the atmosphere, but a piece of it may have survived and smashed through a house in Florida.

On March 8, a two-pound cylindrical-shaped object crashed through the roof of a family home in Naples, Florida, creating a hole in the ceiling and the floor. The incident coincided with the reentry of the ISS pallet, which plummeted through the atmosphere on the same day over the Gulf of Mexico, ultimately heading toward southwest Florida.

“I was shaking. I was completely in disbelief. What are the chances of something landing on my house with such force to cause so much damage,” Alejandro Otero, the owner of the house, told Wink News. “I’m super grateful that nobody got hurt.” Otero reached out to NASA and began eliciting the help of others online to help him trace the origins of the object from the sky.

Submission + - Are Your Solar Eclipse Glasses Fake? Here's How to Check (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Fienberg is project manager of the AAS Solar Eclipse Task Force, which is busy preparing for the total eclipse over North America on April 8. He’s the creator of a list of vetted solar filters and viewers that will protect wearers’ eyes as they watch the moon move in front of the sun. When a solar eclipse last crossed a major swath of the U.S. in 2017, Fienberg and his team spotted some counterfeit glasses entering the marketplace—imitations that distributors claimed were manufactured by vetted companies. Testing at accredited labs indicated that many counterfeits were actually safe to use, however. This led the task force to describe such eclipse glasses as “misleading” but not “dangerous” in a March 11 statement meant to reassure the public.

But then Fienberg’s phone rang. The caller was “a guy who had bought thousands of eclipse glasses from a distributor who had been on our list at one point,” Fienberg says. “Those glasses were not safe. They were no darker than ordinary sunglasses.” Legitimate eclipse glasses are at least 1,000 times darker than the darkest sunglasses you can buy.

Fienberg contacted Cangnan County Qiwei Craft, a Chinese factory that he knew manufactured safe glasses and had—in the past—sold them to the distributor in question. But this time, Fienberg says, factory representatives told him they hadn’t sold to that distributor in a long while. “That’s when we switched from being concerned about only counterfeits to being concerned about actual fakes,” Fienberg says.

The AAS does not have a confident estimate of how many fake or counterfeit glasses are for sale out there. And though Fienberg doesn’t think this is a widespread problem, the situation is an “iceberg kind of concern,” he says, because there are likely more examples than the ones he knows about. While counterfeit glasses may still be safe to use, completely fake glasses could put wearers in serious danger.

If you’re viewing the upcoming eclipse, there are specific indicators you can look for when evaluating products for safety—and ways to test glasses before you stare at the sun.

THE STANDARD FOR SOLAR ECLIPSE VIEWERS
On April 8 viewers within a 115-mile-wide band stretching across Mexico and the U.S. into eastern Canada will experience a total solar eclipse: what happens when the moon passes directly between the sun and Earth, completely blocking the face of our star. Outside of this band, people in much of North America will be able to see a partial eclipse.

Submission + - A faster spinning Earth may force a subtraction of a second from clocks (go.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Earth’s changing spin is threatening to toy with our sense of time, clocks and computerized society in an unprecedented way — but only for a second.

For the first time in history, world timekeepers may have to consider subtracting a second from our clocks in a few years because the planet is rotating a tad faster than it used to. Clocks may have to skip a second — called a “negative leap second” — around 2029, a study in the journal Nature said Wednesday.

“This is an unprecedented situation and a big deal,” said study lead author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s not a huge change in the Earth’s rotation that’s going to lead to some catastrophe or anything, but it is something notable. It’s yet another indication that we’re in a very unusual time.”

Ice melting at both of Earth’s poles has been counteracting the planet's burst of speed and is likely to have delayed this global second of reckoning by about three years, Agnew said.

“We are headed toward a negative leap second," said Dennis McCarthy, retired director of time for the U.S. Naval Observatory who wasn’t part of the study. "It’s a matter of when.”

It’s a complicated situation that involves, physics, global power politics, climate change, technology and two types of time.

Earth takes about 24 hours to rotate, but the key word is about.

For thousands of years, the Earth has been generally slowing down, with the rate varying from time to time, said Agnew and Judah Levine, a physicist for the time and frequency division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The slowing is mostly caused by the effect of tides, which are caused by the pull of the moon, McCarthy said.

This didn’t matter until atomic clocks were adopted as the official time standard more than 55 years ago. Those didn’t slow.

That established two versions of time — astronomical and atomic — and they didn't match. Astronomical time fell behind atomic time by 2.5 milliseconds every day. That meant the atomic clock would say it’s midnight and to Earth it was midnight a fraction of a second later, Agnew said.

Those daily fractions of seconds added up to whole seconds every few years. Starting in 1972, international timekeepers decided to add a “leap second” in June or December for astronomical time to catch up to the atomic time, called Coordinated Universal Time or UTC. Instead of 11:59 and 59 seconds turning to midnight, there would be another second at 11:59 and 60 seconds. A negative leap second would go from 11:59 and 58 seconds directly to midnight, skipping 11:59:59.

Between 1972 and 2016, 27 separate leap seconds were added as Earth slowed. But the rate of slowing was tapering off.

“In 2016 or 2017 or maybe 2018, the slowdown rate had slowed down to the point that the Earth was actually speeding up,” Levine said.

Earth’s speeding up because its hot liquid core — “a large ball of molten fluid” — acts in unpredictable ways, with eddies and flows that vary, Agnew said.

Agnew said the core has been triggering a speedup for about 50 years, but rapid melting of ice at the poles since 1990 masked that effect. Melting ice shifts Earth’s mass from the poles to the bulging center, which slows the rotation much like a spinning ice skater slows when extending their arms out to their sides, he said.

Without the effect of melting ice, Earth would need that negative leap second in 2026 instead of 2029, Agnew calculated.

For decades, astronomers had been keeping universal and astronomical time together with those handy little leap seconds. But computer system operators said those additions aren’t easy for all the precise technology the world now relies on. In 2012, some computer systems mishandled the leap second, causing problems for Reddit, Linux, Qantas Airlines and others, experts said.

"What is the need for this adjustment in time when it causes so many problems?” McCarthy said.

Submission + - Google to destroy browsing data to settle consumer privacy lawsuit (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Google agreed to destroy billions of data records to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly tracked the internet use of people who thought they were browsing privately.

Terms of the settlement were filed on Monday in the Oakland, California federal court, and require approval by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs valued the accord at more than $5 billion, and as high as $7.8 billion. Though users will not receive damages, they may still sue individually for damages.

The class action began in 2020, covering millions of Google users who used private browsing since June 1, 2016.

Users alleged that Google’s analytics, cookies and apps let the Alphabet unit improperly track people who set Google’s Chrome browser to “Incognito” mode and other browsers to “private” browsing mode.

Under the settlement, Google will update disclosures about what it collects in “private” browsing, a process it has already begun. It will also let Incognito users block third-party cookies for five years.

Submission + - Elon Musk Fought Government Surveillance While Profiting From It (theintercept.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: TEN YEARS AGO, the internet platform X, then known as Twitter, filed a lawsuit against the government it hoped would force transparency around abuse-prone surveillance of social media users. X’s court battle, though, clashes with an uncomfortable fact: The company is itself in the business of government surveillance of social media.

Under the new ownership of Elon Musk, X had continued the litigation, until its defeat in January. The suit was aimed at overturning a governmental ban on disclosing the receipt of requests, known as national security letters, that compel companies to turn over everything from user metadata to private direct messages. Companies that receive these requests are typically legally bound to keep the request secret and can usually only disclose the number they’ve received in a given year in vague numerical ranges.

In its petition to the Supreme Court last September, X’s attorneys took up the banner of communications privacy: “History demonstrates that the surveillance of electronic communications is both a fertile ground for government abuse and a lightning-rod political topic of intense concern to the public.” After the court declined to take up the case in January, Musk responded tweeting, “Disappointing that the Supreme Court declined to hear this matter.”

The court’s refusal to take the case on ended X’s legal bid, but the company and Musk had positioned themselves at the forefront of a battle on behalf of internet users for greater transparency about government surveillance.

However, emails between the U.S. Secret Service and the surveillance firm Dataminr, obtained by The Intercept from a Freedom of Information Act request, show X is in an awkward position, profiting from the sale of user data for government surveillance purposes at the same time as it was fighting secrecy around another flavor of state surveillance in court.

Submission + - Signal App's New Usernames Keep Cops Out Of Your Data (theintercept.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: With the new version of Signal, you will no longer broadcast your phone number to everyone you send messages to by default, though you can choose to if you want. Your phone number will still be displayed to contacts who already have it stored in their phones. Going forward, however, when you start a new conversation on Signal, your number won’t be shared at all: Contacts will just see the name you use when you set up your Signal profile. So even if your contact is using a custom Signal client, for example, they still won’t be able to discover your phone number since the service will never tell it to them.

You also now have the option to set a username, which Signal lets you change whenever you want and delete when you don’t want it anymore. Rather than directly storing your username as part of your account details, Signal stores a cryptographic hash of your username instead; Signal uses the Ristretto 25519 hashing algorithm, essentially storing a random block of data instead of usernames themselves. This is like how online services can confirm a user’s password is valid without storing a copy of the actual password itself.

“As far as we’re aware, we’re the only messaging platform that now has support for usernames that doesn’t know everyone’s usernames by default,” said Josh Lund, a senior technologist at Signal.

The move is yet another piece of the Signal ethos to keep as little data on hand as it can, lest the authorities try to intrude on the company. Whittaker explained, “We don’t want to be forced to enumerate a directory of usernames.”

To prevent people from squatting on high value usernames — like taylorswift, for example — all usernames are required to have a number at the end of them, like taylorswift.89. Once you’ve set a username, other Signal users can start a conversation with you by searching for your username, all without learning your phone number.

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