Comment Software Taser (Score 1) 54
Don't hack me, Bro!
750,000 Medtronic Defibrillators Vulnerable To Hacking (startribune.com) 54
The Homeland Security Department has issued an alert Thursday describing two types of computer-hacking vulnerabilities in 16 different models of Medtronic implantable defibrillators sold around the world, including some still on the market today. The vulnerability also affects bedside monitors that read data from the devices in patients' homes and in-office programming computers used by doctors. From the report: Medtronic recommends that patients only use bedside monitors obtained from a doctor or from Medtronic directly, and to keep it plugged in so it can receive software updates, and that they maintain "good physical control" over the monitor. Implantable defibrillators are complex, battery-run computers implanted in patients' upper chests to monitor the heart and send electric pulses or high-voltage shocks to prevent sudden cardiac death and treat abnormal heart beats. The vulnerabilities announced Thursday do not affect Medtronic pacemakers.
The more serious of the two is a vulnerability that could allow improper access to data sent between a defibrillator and an external device like an at-home monitor. The system doesn't use formal authentication or authorization protections, which means an attacker with short-range access to the device could inject or modify data and change device settings, the advisory says. A second vulnerability allows an attacker to read sensitive data streaming out of the device, which could include the patient's name and past health data stored on their device. The system does not use data encryption, the advisory says. (Deploying encryption in medical devices is tricky because is increases computational complexity and therefore uses the battery faster.) The FDA isn't expected to issue a recall as the vulnerabilities are expected to be patched via a future software update.
The more serious of the two is a vulnerability that could allow improper access to data sent between a defibrillator and an external device like an at-home monitor. The system doesn't use formal authentication or authorization protections, which means an attacker with short-range access to the device could inject or modify data and change device settings, the advisory says. A second vulnerability allows an attacker to read sensitive data streaming out of the device, which could include the patient's name and past health data stored on their device. The system does not use data encryption, the advisory says. (Deploying encryption in medical devices is tricky because is increases computational complexity and therefore uses the battery faster.) The FDA isn't expected to issue a recall as the vulnerabilities are expected to be patched via a future software update.
SpaceX Plans To Blast a Tesla Roadster Into Orbit Around Mars (arstechnica.com) 272
An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:
Previously, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said he intends to launch the "silliest thing we can imagine" on the maiden launch of the Falcon Heavy. This is partly because the rocket is experimental -- there is a non-trivial chance the rocket will explode on the launch pad, or shortly after launch. It is also partly because Musk is a master showman who knows how to grab attention. On Friday evening, Musk tweeted what that payload would be -- his "midnight cherry Tesla Roadster."
And the car will be playing Space Oddity, by David Bowie; the song which begins, "Ground Control to Major Tom." Oh, and the powerful Falcon Heavy rocket will send the Tesla into orbit around Mars. "Will be in deep space for a billion years or so if it doesn't blow up on ascent," Musk added. Ars was able to confirm Friday night from a company source that this is definitely a legitimate payload. Earlier on Friday, Musk also said the Falcon Heavy launch would come "next month" from Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, meaning in January.
"No private company has ever launched a spacecraft beyond low-Earth orbit, let alone to another planet," according to the article, adding that SpaceX's new rocket "could play a major role in any plans the agency has to send humans to the Moon." In addition, Musk added on Twitter, "Red car for a red planet."
UPDATE (12/2/17): Saturday Elon Musk told The Verge that he "totally made it up" about sending a Tesla Roadster to Mars. Then in "multiple emails" to Ars Technica --- sent Saturday afternoon -- "Musk confirmed that this plan is, indeed, real."
And the car will be playing Space Oddity, by David Bowie; the song which begins, "Ground Control to Major Tom." Oh, and the powerful Falcon Heavy rocket will send the Tesla into orbit around Mars. "Will be in deep space for a billion years or so if it doesn't blow up on ascent," Musk added. Ars was able to confirm Friday night from a company source that this is definitely a legitimate payload. Earlier on Friday, Musk also said the Falcon Heavy launch would come "next month" from Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, meaning in January.
"No private company has ever launched a spacecraft beyond low-Earth orbit, let alone to another planet," according to the article, adding that SpaceX's new rocket "could play a major role in any plans the agency has to send humans to the Moon." In addition, Musk added on Twitter, "Red car for a red planet."
UPDATE (12/2/17): Saturday Elon Musk told The Verge that he "totally made it up" about sending a Tesla Roadster to Mars. Then in "multiple emails" to Ars Technica --- sent Saturday afternoon -- "Musk confirmed that this plan is, indeed, real."
Study of Recent Interstellar Asteroid Reveals Bizarre Shape (bbc.com) 144
JoeRobe writes: A few weeks ago an interstellar asteroid, now named "Oumuamua," was discovered passing through our solar system. Being the first interstellar asteroid to ever be observed, a flurry of observations soon followed. This week, an accelerated article in Nature reveals that Oumuamua is more bizarre than originally thought: it is elongated, with a 10:1 aspect ratio, and rapidly rotating. This conclusion is based upon comparisons of its time-dependent light curve to those from 20,000 known asteroids.
Comment Re:So what's the problem? (Score 1) 92
They don't have a linux port of their tools.
Comment Re: Superbowl winning QB Tom Brady traded to Buff (Score 4, Informative) 106
No, it's a play on Hacker News which has the orange theme.
Congressional Candidate Brianna Wu Claims Moon-Colonizing Companies Could Destroy Cities By Dropping Rocks (washingtontimes.com) 642
Applehu Akbar quotes a report from Washington Times: A transgender-issues activist and Democratic candidate for Congress says the advent of the space tourism industry could give private corporations a "frightening amount of power" to destroy the Earth with rocks because of the Moon's military importance. Brianna Wu, a prominent "social justice warrior" in the "Gamergate" controversy who now is running for the House seat in Massachusetts' 8th District, suggested in a since-deleted tweet that companies could drop rocks from the Moon. "The moon is probably the most tactically valuable military ground for earth," the tweet said. "Rocks dropped from there have power of 100s of nuclear bombs." After users on social media questioned her scientific literacy, the congressional candidate clarified that the tweet was "talking about dropping [rocks] into our gravity well." Small space rocks can indeed do nuclear-weapons-scale damage if hitting the Earth at orbital speeds. But launching one from the moon, even setting aside issues of aiming, would still require escaping the satellite's gravitational field, a task that requires the power and thrust contained in a huge rocket.
Milky Way Is Being Pushed Across the Universe (cnn.com) 149
dryriver quotes a report from CNN: Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is being pushed across the universe by a large unseen force, according to new research. Although it may not seem like a friendly gesture, the newly discovered Dipole Repeller is actually helping our galaxy on its journey across the expanding universe. Researchers have known that the galaxy was moving at a relative speed for the past 30 years, but they didn't know why. "Now we find an emptiness in exactly the opposite direction, which provides a 'push' in the sense of a lack of pull," said Brent Tully, one of the study authors and an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy in Honolulu. "In a tug-of-war, if there are more people at one end, then the flow will be toward them and away from the weaker side." But this is no aimless journey of motion. Researchers have long believed that our galaxy was attracted to an area rich with dozens of clusters of galaxies 750 million light-years away, called the Shapley Concentration or Shapley Attractor. "We found a flow pattern reminiscent of streams of water that are organized by gravity to run downhill," Tully said. "In detail, we played a mathematical trick by inverting the sense of gravity to see where flows would terminate in this altered case. Flows ended at our Dipole Repeller."
Comment Obligatory Douglas Adams post (Score 1) 72
Alternative read:
"The mice persuaded the humans to create mouse/rat chimeras and grow them for slaughter, to harvest something the mice needed."
Comment Latency? (Score 1) 128
Can this be used for two-way comms? conversion time from analog to the bitstream, across the net and converted back to voice, what's the delay?
Comment Hand-spinup of a hard drive (Score 1) 210
At a DoD facility we were developing an app for SimNET, BBNs distributed entity-level simulation protocol, that would leverage some existing training facilities.
In our lab we used a Sun 68020-powered workstation with a 150MB external SCSI drive in a 'double shoebox' along with a DC6150 tape drive for backup. The target was a VME card cage with several 68020 CPUs and miscellaneous peripherals, running VxWorks.
We used that machine for eleven months, running it 24 hours a day for nearly a year, but one night the cleaning staff used one of our power strips for their floor buffer and the breaker tripped. When we came in the next day and tried to boot the system the drive wouldn't spin up. It just hummed.
Now, this was only 150MB, but back then 150MB was a full height 5 1/4 inch collection of a half dozen platters. There was a flywhel. I gave it a spin. I felt what I imagine was the heads unsticking from the disc surface... And the drive spun up in my hand. With significant gyroscopic action. I didn't dare turn it off - an associate informed my SunOS 4.1 was booting. I carefully held it there while my associate assembled the shoebox around it.
We finished our work on that project without another power interruption, but we definitely backed up every day.
Cubans Allowed To Export Software and Software Services To the US 166
lpress writes In an effort to support Cuba's nascent private sector, the Treasury Department announced on Friday that Americans can now import goods and services produced by "independent Cuban entrepreneurs." Will the Cuban government allow that? Cuba is a communist nation, but they have a list of 201 job categories in which self-employment is permitted. Most of those jobs are goofy things like magician and pedal-taxi driver, but one is not – computer programmer. Will the Castro regime let private individuals and organizations export software and software services to the United States and the rest of the world?
Robots Put To Work On E-Waste 39
aesoteric writes: Australian researchers have programmed industrial robots to tackle the vast array of e-waste thrown out every year. The research shows robots can learn and memorize how various electronic products — such as LCD screens — are designed, enabling those products to be disassembled for recycling faster and faster. The end goal is less than five minutes to dismantle a product.
Comment Re:What system d really is (Score 1) 928
Slackware.
New Watson-Style AI Called Viv Seeks To Be the First 'Global Brain' 161
paysonwelch sends this report from Wired on the next generation of consumer AI:
Google Now has a huge knowledge graph—you can ask questions like "Where was Abraham Lincoln born?" And it can name the city. You can also say, "What is the population?" of a city and it’ll bring up a chart and answer. But you cannot say, "What is the population of the city where Abraham Lincoln was born?" The system may have the data for both these components, but it has no ability to put them together, either to answer a query or to make a smart suggestion. Like Siri, it can’t do anything that coders haven’t explicitly programmed it to do. Viv breaks through those constraints by generating its own code on the fly, no programmers required. Take a complicated command like "Give me a flight to Dallas with a seat that Shaq could fit in." Viv will parse the sentence and then it will perform its best trick: automatically generating a quick, efficient program to link third-party sources of information together—say, Kayak, SeatGuru, and the NBA media guide—so it can identify available flights with lots of legroom.
