Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - China Successfully Launches Reusable Suborbital Carrier Vehicle (spacenews.com)

Submitted by AltMachine
AltMachine writes: China conducted a clandestine first test flight of a reusable suborbital vehicle Friday as a part of development of a reusable space transportation system. The vertical takeoff and horizontal landing (VTHL) vehicle launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center Friday and later landed at an airport just over 800 kilometers away at Alxa League in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC) announced. The test follows a September 2020 test flight of a “reusable experimental spacecraft”. The spacecraft orbited for days, releasing a small transmitting payload and later deorbited and landed horizontally. So far, not a single real photo of either plane has been revealed. According to CASC’s China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, the aim was full reusability, moving beyond partial reusability of Falcon 9-like launchers, though several Chinese companies are also developing reusable rockets. While the U.S. X-37B, a rocket-launched spaceplane, has flown several times, Boeing exited the Experimental Spaceplane (XSP) program, also known as the XS-1 program, another VTHL concept.

Submission + - Parts Of Amazon Rainforest Now Releasing More Carbon Than It Absorbs (npr.org)

Submitted by phalse phace
phalse phace writes: Portions of the Amazon rainforest are now releasing more carbon dioxide than they absorb, disrupting an important balancing act that signals a worsening of the climate crisis, according to a new study.

Findings from the nearly decade-long research project, published Wednesday in the journal Nature , suggest that deforestation and fire, among other factors, have dramatically undercut the Amazon's ability to absorb heat-trapping carbon emissions from the atmosphere.

Researchers who routinely tested the atmosphere at four areas in Amazonia twice a month over a nine-year period found that not only are carbon emissions higher in the eastern areas of the rainforest than in the western areas, but that the southeastern area is putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it absorbs. The eastern Amazon is a hotspot of deforestation to facilitate logging and agriculture, including cattle ranches.

In addition to deforestation and fires, the study says the rise in emissions from the Amazon has been accelerated by warming temperatures and "moisture stress" during the dry season. The eastern areas have less moisture than the west during already-difficult dry periods, which now have become drier and have lasted longer due to climate change.

Submission + - SPAM: UK To Ban Online Racists From Soccer Games

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson says the government plans to ban anyone guilty of online racist abuse from soccer matches as authorities continue to respond to the lawlessness connected to England’s loss in the final of the European soccer championship. Johnson on Wednesday told lawmakers that it was time to act after three Black members of England’s national team were targeted by racist abuse on social media after they failed to score during the penalty shootout that sealed the team’s loss to Italy on Sunday night. The government plans to add online racism to the list of offenses for which fans can be barred from matches, he said.

“What we are doing is taking practical steps to ensure that the football banning regime is changed so that if you are guilty of racist abuse online on football, then you will not be going to the match,” Johnson said during his weekly prime minister’s questions session. “No ifs, no buts, no exemptions, no excuses.” Courts are allowed to issue banning orders if a fan is convicted of a “relevant offence” linked to a match, including crimes such as disorderly behavior or possession of weapons.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - To catch deep-space neutrinos, astronomers lay traps in Greenland's ice (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: High on Greenland’s ice sheet, particle astrophysicists are this week drilling boreholes in a search for the cosmic accelerators responsible for the universe’s most energetic particles. By placing hundreds of radio antennas on and below the surface, they hope to trap elusive particles known as neutrinos at higher energies than ever before. Detectors elsewhere on Earth occasionally register the arrival of ultra–high-energy (UHE) cosmic rays, atomic nuclei that slam into the atmosphere at colossal speed. Researchers want to pinpoint their sources, but because the nuclei are charged, magnetic fields in space bend their paths, obscuring their origins. But theorists believe that as UHE cosmic rays set out from their sources, they spawn so-called cosmogenic neutrinos in collisions with photons and, because neutrinos are not charged, they travel to Earth as straight as an arrow. The hard part is catching them.

Submission + - EU is now going to tax imports based on CO2 from their regions 1

Submitted by WindBourne
WindBourne writes: EU is going to put a slowly increasing carbon tax on their own goods and is now applying that tax to a limited number of imported items, with more to come. It is expected to have an initial impact on goods from China, India, and Russia, but as this expands, it will likely hit other nations. All of these nations are saying that they will protest at the WTO which will likely take 2-5 years.

While EU is not as large an importer as say America, this will have an impact on the globe, hopefully, pushing all nations to at least stop increasing, if not drop, their emissions.

Here is pay-wall WSJ article that expands on this.

Submission + - Boeing Slows Dreamliner Production After New Manufacturing Issue (wsj.com)

Submitted by phalse phace
phalse phace writes: A new production problem has surfaced with Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, further delaying deliveries of the popular wide-body jets. The new problem surfaced on part of the aircraft known as the forward pressure bulkhead at the front of the plane, people familiar with the matter said. It involves the skin of the aircraft and is similar to a previously disclosed Dreamliner issue found elsewhere on the planes. It surfaced as part of the FAA’s review of Boeing’s quality checks on newly produced, undelivered planes. Engineers at Boeing and the FAA are trying to understand the defect’s potential to cause premature fatigue on a key part of the aircraft’s structure. The FAA said the newly discovered quality issue on certain 787s posed no immediate safety threat.

The current Dreamliner delivery halt follows a five-month delivery pause from last fall through this spring. That led to a pileup of around 100 planes by the end of April, many of which Boeing had hoped to deliver by year-end. Boeing said Tuesday it expected to deliver less than half its 787 inventory this year. It delivered 14 Dreamliners as of the end of June.

The delivery pause is another setback for the aerospace company, which has been grappling with various problems in its commercial, defense and space programs in recent years. It is also choking off an important source of cash as Boeing tries to overcome twin crises that resulted from two fatal crashes of its 737 MAX aircraft in late 2018 and early 2019 and the Covid-19 pandemic’s hit to aircraft demand.

Submission + - Elusive glass octopus spotted in the remote Pacific Ocean (livescience.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: This rarely seen glass octopus bared all recently — even a view of its innards — when an underwater robot filmed it gracefully soaring through the deep waters of the Central Pacific Ocean, off the remote Phoenix Islands, an archipelago located more than 3,200 miles (5,100 kilometers) northeast of Sydney, Australia.

Like other "glass" creatures, such as glass frogs and certain comb jellies, glass octopuses are almost completely transparent, with only their cylindrical eyes, optic nerve and digestive tract appearing opaque. The expedition crew reported two encounters with the glass octopus — an impressive count given that previously there was such limited footage of these clear cephalopods, scientists had to learn about them by studying chunks of them in the gut contents of their predators.

Glass octopuses weren’t discovered until 1918. Little is known about these cephalopods, except that they live in tropical and subtropical areas in the deep ocean in the mesopelagic, or twilight zone, 656 to 3,280 feet (200 to 1,000 meters) below the surface, and the bathypelagic, or midnight zone, 3,280 to 9,800 feet (1,000 to 3,000 m) below the surface.

Submission + - SPAM: NFC Flaws Let Researchers Hack An ATM By Waving a Phone

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For years, security researchers and cybercriminals have hacked ATMs by using all possible avenues to their innards, from opening a front panel and sticking a thumb drive into a USB port to drilling a hole that exposes internal wiring. Now, one researcher has found a collection of bugs that allow him to hack ATMs—along with a wide variety of point-of-sale terminals—in a new way: with a wave of his phone over a contactless credit card reader. Josep Rodriguez, a researcher and consultant at security firm IOActive, has spent the last year digging up and reporting vulnerabilities in the so-called near-field communications reader chips used in millions of ATMs and point-of-sale systems worldwide. NFC systems are what let you wave a credit card over a reader—rather than swipe or insert it—to make a payment or extract money from a cash machine. You can find them on countless retail store and restaurant counters, vending machines, taxis, and parking meters around the globe.

Now Rodriguez has built an Android app that allows his smartphone to mimic those credit card radio communications and exploit flaws in the NFC systems' firmware. With a wave of his phone, he can exploit a variety of bugs to crash point-of-sale devices, hack them to collect and transmit credit card data, invisibly change the value of transactions, and even lock the devices while displaying a ransomware message. Rodriguez says he can even force at least one brand of ATMs to dispense cash—though that "jackpotting" hack only works in combination with additional bugs he says he has found in the ATMs' software. He declined to specify or disclose those flaws publicly due to nondisclosure agreements with the ATM vendors. "You can modify the firmware and change the price to one dollar, for instance, even when the screen shows that you're paying 50 dollars. You can make the device useless, or install a kind of ransomware. There are a lot of possibilities here," says Rodriguez of the point-of-sale attacks he discovered. "If you chain the attack and also send a special payload to an ATM's computer, you can jackpot the ATM—like cash out, just by tapping your phone."

Rodriguez says he alerted the affected vendors—which include ID Tech, Ingenico, Verifone, Crane Payment Innovations, BBPOS, Nexgo, and the unnamed ATM vendor—to his findings between seven months and a year ago. Even so, he warns that the sheer number of affected systems and the fact that many point-of-sale terminals and ATMs don't regularly receive software updates—and in many cases require physical access to update—mean that many of those devices likely remain vulnerable. "Patching so many hundreds of thousands of ATMs physically, it's something that would require a lot of time," Rodriguez says.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - WD My Book data deleted -- Disconnect from the Internet now! (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by PuceBaboon
PuceBaboon writes: Ars Technica is reporting that some owners of Western Digital "My Book" network connected disk drives are experiencing data loss on their devices. The as yet unverified problem appears to be an externally initiated factory-reset, resulting in a loss of all existing data. At this early stage, Western Digital is warning users that they should disconnect their devices from the Internet to protect their data.

Submission + - The Chang'e-5 Recovery Team Wore Powered Exoskeletons (universetoday.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Other worlds aren’t the only difficult terrain personnel will have to traverse in humanity’s exploration of the solar system. There are some parts of our own planet that are inhospitable and hard to travel over. Inner Mongolia, a northern province of China, would certainly classify as one of those areas, especially in winter. But that’s exactly the terrain team members from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASTC) had to traverse on December 16th to retrieve lunar samples from the Chang’e-5 mission. What was even more unique is that they did it with the help of exoskeletons.

Strangely enough, the workers wearing the exoskeletons weren’t there to help with a difficult mountain ascent, or even pick up the payload of the lunar lander itself (which only weighed 2 kg). It was to set up a communications tent to connect the field team back to the main CASTC headquarters in Beijing.The exoskeletons were designed to help people carry approximately twice as much as they would be able to. Local state media described a single person carrying 50kg over 100m of the rough terrain without becoming tired. Setting up communications equipment isn’t all the exoskeletons are good for though. They were most recently used by Chinese military logistics and medical staff in the Himalayas, where the country has been facing down the Indian military over a disputed line of control.

Submission + - Woman Sheds Coronavirus For 70 Days Without Symptoms (livescience.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A woman with COVID-19 in Washington state shed infectious virus particles for 70 days, meaning she was contagious during that entire time, despite never showing symptoms of the disease, according to a new report. The 71-year-old woman had a type of leukemia, or cancer of the white blood cells, and so her immune system was weakened and less able to clear her body of the new coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2. Although researchers have suspected that people with weakened immune systems may shed the virus for longer than typical, there was little evidence of this happening, until now.

The findings contradict guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which say that immunocompromised people with COVID-19 are likely not infectious after 20 days. The new findings suggest "long-term shedding of infectious virus may be a concern in certain immunocompromised patients," the authors wrote in their paper, published in the journal Cell.

Submission + - Russian Hackers Targeted California, Indiana Democratic Parties (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The group of Russian hackers accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election earlier this year targeted the email accounts of Democratic state parties in California and Indiana, and influential think tanks in Washington and New York, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The attempted intrusions, many of which were internally flagged by Microsoft Corp over the summer, were carried out by a group often nicknamed “Fancy Bear.” The hackers’ activity provides insight into how Russian intelligence is targeting the United States in the run-up to the Nov. 3 election. The targets identified by Reuters, which include the Center for American Progress, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said they had not seen any evidence of successful hacking attempts.

Fancy Bear is controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency and was responsible for hacking the email accounts of Hillary Clinton’s staff in the run-up to the 2016 election, according to a Department of Justice indictment filed in 2018. News of the Russian hacking activity follows last month's announcement here by Microsoft that Fancy Bear had attempted to hack more than 200 organizations, many of which the software company said were tied to the 2020 election. Microsoft was able to link this year's cyber espionage campaign to the Russian hackers through an apparent programming error that allowed the company to identify a pattern of attack unique to Fancy Bear, according to a Microsoft assessment reviewed by Reuters. The thrust of espionage operations could not be determined by Reuters. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in August here that Russian operations were attempting to undermine the campaign of presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Submission + - Waymo Pulls Back the Curtain On 6.1 Million Miles of Self-Driving Car Data (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In its first report on its autonomous vehicle operations in Phoenix, Arizona, Waymo said that it was involved in 18 crashes and 29 near-miss collisions during 2019 and the first nine months of 2020. These crashes included rear-enders, vehicle swipes, and even one incident when a Waymo vehicle was T-boned at an intersection by another car at nearly 40 mph. The company said that no one was seriously injured and “nearly all” of the collisions were the fault of the other driver. The report is the deepest dive yet into the real-life operations of the world’s leading autonomous vehicle company, which recently began offering rides in its fully driverless vehicles to the general public. Autonomous vehicle (AV) companies can be a black box, with most firms keeping a tight lid on measurable metrics and only demonstrating their technology to the public under the most controlled settings. Indeed, Waymo, which was spun out of Google in 2016, mostly communicates about its self-driving program through glossy press releases or blog posts that reveal scant data about the actual nuts and bolts of autonomous driving. But in this paper, and another also published today, the company is showing its work. Waymo says its intention is to build public trust in automated vehicle technology, but these papers also serve as a challenge to other AV competitors.

The two papers take different approaches. The first outlines a multilayered approach that maps out Waymo’s approach to safety. It includes three layers: Hardware, including the vehicle itself, the sensor suite, the steering and braking system, and the computing platform; The automated driving system behavioral layer, such as avoiding collisions with other cars, successfully completing fully autonomous rides, and adhering to the rules of the road; Operations, like fleet operations, risk management, and a field safety program to resolve potential safety issues.

The second paper is meatier, with detailed information on the company’s self-driving operations in Phoenix, including the number of miles driven and the number of “contact events” Waymo’s vehicles have had with other road users. This is the first time that Waymo has ever publicly disclosed mileage and crash data from its autonomous vehicle testing operation in Phoenix. Between January and December 2019, Waymo’s vehicles with trained safety drivers drove 6.1 million miles. In addition, from January 2019 through September 2020, its fully driverless vehicles drove 65,000 miles. Taken together, the company says this represents “over 500 years of driving for the average licensed US driver,” citing a 2017 survey of travel trends by the Federal Highway Administration.

Submission + - All of South Australia's power comes from solar panels in world first for major (abc.net.au) 1

Submitted by Anonymouse Cowtard
Anonymouse Cowtard writes: South Australia's renewable energy boom has achieved a global milestone.

The state once known for not having enough power has become the first major jurisdiction in the world to be powered entirely by solar energy.

For just over an hour on Sunday, October 11, 100 per cent of energy demand was met by solar panels alone.

"This is truly a phenomenon in the global energy landscape," Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) chief executive Audrey Zibelman said.

"Never before has a jurisdiction the size of South Australia been completely run by solar power, with consumers' rooftop solar systems contributing 77 per cent."

Large-scale solar farms, like the ones operating at Tailem Bend and Port Augusta, provided the other 23 per cent.

Any excess power generated by gas and wind farms on that day was stored in batteries or exported to Victoria via the interconnector.

Submission + - Google AI Tech Will Be Used For Virtual Border Wall, CBP Contract Shows (theintercept.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After years of backlash over controversial government work, Google technology will be used to aid the Trump administration’s efforts to fortify the U.S.-Mexico border, according to documents related to a federal contract. In August, Customs and Border Protection accepted a proposal to use Google Cloud technology to facilitate the use of artificial intelligence deployed by the CBP Innovation Team, known as INVNT. Among other projects, INVNT is working on technologies for a new “virtual” wall along the southern border that combines surveillance towers and drones, blanketing an area with sensors to detect unauthorized entry into the country.

Contracting documents indicate that CBP’s new work with Google is being done through a third-party federal contracting firm, Virginia-based Thundercat Technology. Thundercat is a reseller that bills itself as a premier information technology provider for federal contracts. The contract was obtained through a FOIA request filed by Tech Inquiry, a new research group that explores technology and corporate power founded by Jack Poulson, a former research scientist at Google who left the company over ethical concerns. Not only is Google becoming involved in implementing the Trump administration’s border policy, the contract brings the company into the orbit of one of President Donald Trump’s biggest boosters among tech executives.

Documents show that Google’s technology for CBP will be used in conjunction with work done by Anduril Industries, a controversial defense technology startup founded by Palmer Luckey. The brash 28-year-old executive — also the founder of Oculus VR, acquired by Facebook for over $2 billion in 2014 — is an open supporter of and fundraiser for hard-line conservative politics; he has been one of the most vocal critics of Google’s decision to drop its military contract. Anduril operates sentry towers along the U.S.-Mexico border that are used by CBP for surveillance and apprehension of people entering the country, streamlining the process of putting migrants in DHS custody. CBP’s Autonomous Surveillance Towers program calls for automated surveillance operations “24 hours per day, 365 days per year” to help the agency “identify items of interest, such as people or vehicles.” The program has been touted as a “true force multiplier for CBP, enabling Border Patrol agents to remain focused on their interdiction mission rather than operating surveillance systems.” It’s unclear how exactly CBP plans to use Google Cloud in conjunction with Anduril or for any of the “mission needs” alluded to in the contract document.

Slashdot Top Deals

"There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don't know yet." -Ambrose Bierce

Close