176623567
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Geoffrey.landis writes:
Over the last three months of 2024, more than 800 cases of GPS interference were recorded in Lithuanian airspace. Estonia and Finland have also raised concerns, accusing Russia of deploying technology to jam satellite navigation signals near Nato's eastern flank. A group of British scientists – dubbed the "Time Lords" – are working on a solution: to develop portable atomic clocks. By carrying a group of atoms cooled to -273C on the plane itself, rather than relying on an external signal, the technology can't be interfered with by jamming. But the problem is that the equipment is still too large to be used routinely on planes. The UK Hub for Quantum Enabled Position Navigation and Timing (QEPNT) was set up last December by the government to shrink the devices on to a chip, making them robust enough for everyday life and affordable for everyone. Henry White, part of the team from BAE Systems that worked on the test flight, told BBC News that he thought the first application could be aboard ships, "where there's a bit more space".
175522801
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Geoffrey.landis writes:
Economist Phillip Kobernick makes the case that the emphasis on fast-charging stations for electric vehicles in the US is misplaced. According to an article in cleantechnica, he argues that from an economic standpoint, what we should be doing is making more slow chargers. All thing equal, who wouldn’t choose a 10-minute charge over a 3-hour charge or a 10-hour charge? But all things are not equal. Superfast chargers are far more expensive than Level 2 chargers, and Level 2 chargers are also significantly more expensive than Level 1 charging infrastructure, which are normal electricity outlets. He points out that we get 4–7 times more charging capability installed for the same cost by going with Level 1 charging instead of Level 2. And given that people often just plug in their electric vehicles overnight, Level 1 charging can more than adequately provide what you need in that time. The case is examined in a podcast on the site.
175460237
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Geoffrey.landis writes:
The Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute, part of the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), has unveiled their design for a reusable uncrewed spaceplane for delivering and returning cargo from the Chinese Tiangong space station. Like the Sierra Space "Dream Chaser," the vehicle is to be launched as a payload on a separate launch vehicle, and land horizontally on Earth on a runway. The design is aerodynamically a hybrid, incorporating features of both winged and lifting-body designs. A model of the Haolong will make its debut at the 15th "Airshow China", November 12 to 17 in Zhuhai. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
175426743
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Geoffrey.landis writes:
Despite its impressive output, a recent study from MI suggests generative AI doesn’t have a coherent understanding of the world. While the best-performing large language models have surprising capabilities that make it seem like the models are implicitly learning some general truths about the world, that isn’t necessarily the case. The recent paper showed that Large Language Models and game-playing AI implicitly model the world, but the models are flawed and incomplete. An example study showed that a popular type of generative AI model accurately provided turn-by-turn driving directions in New York City, without having formed an accurate internal map of the city. Despite the model can navigating effectively, when the researchers closed some streets and added detours, its performance plummeted. When they dug deeper, the researchers found that the New York maps the model implicitly generated had many nonexistent streets curving between the grid and connecting far away intersections.
174500355
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Geoffrey.landis writes:
According to a new report from the United Nations, the world population is expected to grow to an estimated peak of 10.3 billion people in the mid-2080s, an increase over the current global population of 8.2 billion people. The estimated world population at the end of the century (2100) is now expected to be 6% less than estimates from a decade ago. However, calculating the number of future people is not a perfect science, with “many sources of uncertainty in estimating the global population,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It estimated the world reached 8 billion people last September, while the U.N. timed the milestone nearly one year earlier.
172782185
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Geoffrey.landis writes:
The Japan SLIM spacecraft has successfully landed on moon... but power problems mean it may be short mission. The good news is that the landing was successful, making Japan only the fifth nation to successfully make a lunar landing, and the ultra-miniature rover and the hopper both deployed. The bad news is that the solar arrays aren't producing power, and unless they can fix the problem in the next few hours, the batteries will be depleted and it will die. But, short mission or long, hurrah for Japan for being the fifth country to successfully land a mission on the surface of the moon. (On their third try- two previous missions didn't make it). It's a rather amazing mission. I've never seen a spacecraft concept that lands under rocket power vertically but then rotates over to rest horizontally on the surface.
172770211
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Geoffrey.landis writes:
Electric vehicles often get bad press about their performance in the cold. Now, Electrek presents actual data comparing failure rates of EVs versus ICE cars, thanks to our friends in Norway. Everywhere in the world, internal combustion engine vehicles fail in the cold a lot more often than electric vehicles, but that’s mostly due to the fact that there are a lot more of them. In Norway, almost 1 in 4 cars on the road is electric, which makes it easy to adjust per capita. The country has been experiencing extreme cold conditions since the beginning of the year, and Viking, a road assistance company (think AAA), says that it responded to 34,000 assistance requests in the first 9 days of the year. Viking says that only 13% of the cases were coming from electric vehicles. This means that electric cars are almost twice as good as fossil cars in the cold. To be fair, this data doesn’t adjust for the age of the vehicles. Older gas-powered cars fail at a higher rate than the new ones and electric vehicles are obviously much more recent on average.
171753096
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Geoffrey.landis writes:
The sun has set in the south polar region of the moon where India's Chandrayaan-3 mission has landed, and the rover has switched off for the night. With luck from the moon gods, it will wake up with the sunrise in 14 days. But, even if not, mission accomplished! It was designed for fourteen days of operation, the daylight period. In that time the rover accomplished just over a hundred meters (American units: one football field) of traverse, examining and chemically analyzing the surface. Good work, India!
171575160
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Geoffrey.landis writes:
Financial Times outlines the complicated geopolitical background of the Russian-speaking hacker gangs that are responsible for malware and ransomware, starting with "one of the most remarkable if little-known events in post-cold war history: the first and, to my knowledge, the last publicly organised conference of avowed criminals" in May, 2002.
The First Worldwide Carders Conference was the brainchild of the administrators of a landmark website,carderplanet.com. Known as “the family”, this was a mixed group of young men, both Ukrainians and Russians, who had spent the previous 10 years growing up in a lively atmosphere of gangster capitalism. During the 1990s, conventional law and order in the former Soviet Union had broken down. The collapse of the communist system had left a vacuum in which new forms of economic activity were emerging.
The young criminals who signed up for the Odesa conference were no gun wielders. They boasted a different talent: advanced computing ability. They were honing their skills at the same time as western businesses had begun experimenting with buying and selling stuff over the internet. In this brave new world of internet commerce, security occupied only a small territory. Founded a year before the conference, CarderPlanet revolutionised web-based criminal activity, especially the lucrative trade in stolen or cloned credit card data, by solving the conundrum that until then had faced every bad guy on the web: how can I do business with this person, as I know he’s a criminal, so he must be untrustworthy by definition?
95129665
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Geoffrey.landis writes:
The Atlantic profiles a computer scientist: Barbara Simons, who has been on the forefront of the pushback against electronic voting as a technology susceptible to fraud and hacking. When she first started writing articles about the dangers of electronic voting with no paper trail, the idea that software could be manipulated to rig elections was considered a fringe preoccupation, but Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election have reversed Simons’s fortunes. According to the Department of Homeland Security, those efforts included attempts to meddle with the electoral process in 21 states; while a series of highly publicized hacks—at Sony, Equifax, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management—has driven home the reality that very few computerized systems are truly secure.
Simons is a former President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM); and the group she helps run, Verified Voting, has been active in educating the public about the dangers of unverified voting since 2003.
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Geoffrey.landis writes:
According to the Washington Post, 32 states have implemented some form of online voting for the 2016 U.S. presidential election-- even though multiple experts warn that internet voting is not secure. In many cases, the online voting options are for absentee ballots, overseas citizens or military members deployed overseas.
According to Verified voting, "voted ballots sent via Internet simply cannot be made secure and make easy and inviting targets for attackers ranging from lone hackers to foreign governments seeking to undermine US elections."
78826217
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Geoffrey.landis writes:
Blue Origin's "New Shepherd" suborbital vehicle made its first flight into space (defined as 100 km altitude)... and successfully landed both the capsule (by parachute) and the booster rocket (vertical landing under rocket power). This is the first time that a vehicle has made it into space and had all components fully recovered for reuse since the NASA flights of the X-15 in the 1960s.
Check out the videos at various places on the web
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Geoffrey.landis writes:
Computerized voting machines are bad news in general, but the WINVote machines used in Virginia might just have earned their reputation as the most insecure voting machine in America, featuring wifi that can't be turned off (protected, however, with a WEP password of "abcde"), an unencrypted database, and administrative access with a hardcoded password of "admin." According to security research Jeremy Epstein, if the machines weren't hacked in past elections, "it was because nobody tried." But with no paper trail-- we'll never know.
Well, after ignoring the well-documented problems for over a decade, Virginia finally decided to decommission the machines... after the governor had problems with the machines last election and demanded an investigation.
"In total, the vulnerabilities investigators found were so severe and so trivial to exploit, Epstein noted that “anyone with even a modicum of training could have succeeded” in hacking them. An attacker wouldn’t have needed to be inside a polling place either to subvert an election... someone 'within a half mile with a rudimentary antenna built using a Pringles can could also have attacked them."
74489071
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Geoffrey.landis writes:
Last week a news story suggested that a new model of sunspot activity predicted a dramatic drop in solar activity coming up, possibly resulting in coming a mini-ice age. Take that prediction with a bit of skepticism, though-- later news analysis suggests that the story may be more media hype than science. Valentina Zharkova, the scientist whose research is being quoted, made no mention of a "mini Ice age"-- her work was only on modelling the solar dynamo. And, in any case, the solar minimum predicted was estimated to last only three solar cycles-- far less than the 17th century Maunder Minimum.
Phil Plait, known for his "bad astronomy" column, does a more detailed analysis of the claims, pointing out that the effect, if it even exists at all, is weak-- and the much discussed "Little Ice Age" is currently believed to most likely have been triggered by volcanic action, not sunspots. And, in any case, any predicted cooling is small compared to already-present global warming.
So, probably no need to stock up on firewood, dried food, and ammunition quite yet-- the mini ice age isn't likely to be coming quite yet.
68009435
submission
Geoffrey.landis writes:
An article about the current California drought on 538 points out that even though global climate warming may exacerbate droughts, it's nearly impossible to attribute any particular drought to climate warming:
The complex, dynamic nature of our atmosphere and oceans makes it extremely difficult to link any particular weather event to climate change. That’s because of the intermingling of natural variations with human-caused ones.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...
They also cite a Nature editorial pointing out the same thing about extreme weather: http://www.nature.com/news/ext...
