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Comment The timeline is of note. (Score 1) 36

It seems worth noting that one of the items in Wyden's rather pointed inquiry is the fact that the feasibility of doing this is known to have been demonstrated for the DoD by outside people familiar with it at least as early as 2016; so while this is the first confirmed case of adversarial use it's the outcome of at least a decade of just ignoring the problem; and a significantly longer period of failing to reasonably anticipate the problem. It's not like there's No Such Agency you could ask about "how could you spy on someone with the internet even?" if you wanted to know how well or poorly readily available information matched a nation state signals intelligence apparatus.

Purely as a matter of cellphones being expensive and somewhat tepidly capable in the before times I assume that there was a period within living memory when merely telling people not to Gordon Gekko on their DynaTAC where the russians can hear you was good enough; but that would have clearly and rapidly been getting less true for at least a quarter century.

Comment Re:Why the myopic obsession with O2? (Score 1) 25

There's a lot of speculation about life as we don't know it. And that's what it is: speculation. While there are microbes that don't rely on oxygen, and one animal, they are utterly dependent on environments that do require oxygen. So no abiotic life origins here.

Without knowing for sure what to look for in a chlorine based life form even with it live in front of us, performing the forensic search with the body cold billions of years is all but impossible. We will get there some day but people are looking for signs unambiguous, and that means life as we know it.

Comment First Amendment (Score 4, Informative) 35

In the US this is protected speech. There is a flaw in published software such that x and y... This is a statement of observed fact no matter how obscure.

Poor form, yes. Illegal, no. To threaten or intimidate rather than fix the fault is reliance on the ancient Microsoft trope security through obscurity. Tolerance of that oppressive behavior makes us less secure, not more.

Closing their account on your service is fair game though. No obligation to host anyone for any reason.

Dealing with aggrieved customers is just a part of doing business with the public. No matter how well you behave some people just have issues, and some will have legitimate complaints. Microsoft is a multitrillion dollar multinational corporation. That comes with the turf.

Comment Re:Space is still hard (Score 2) 71

>And they will have arisen long long before the explosion.

I am no expert but... At a propellant feed rate of 2,300kg per second and a turbine speed of 19000 rpm that's a lot of mass in motion to come to a sudden stop. At 350 bar of turbopump pressure I can see there being a lot of bang at the first sign of trouble. The engineering limits on these devices may not be fully characterized until mass production has rolled for a while.

Comment Definitely a bad look... (Score 4, Interesting) 35

The whole 'responsible disclosure' preaching and the not-terribly-subtle threats seem particularly bad given that there's an entire industry of actively more dangerous people who are not only treated as legal but actively courted by state agents and cops(and often even less savory customers, though they tend to be cagey about those); the ones who actively seek to keep vulnerabilities quiet so that they can continue to sell exploit tools and services based on them. Throwing zero days on github isn't ideal vs. getting them fixed; but it gets them fixed faster than if Cellebrite wants to hang on to a bitlocker bypass or Trenchant, and L3Harris Technologies Company, wants to keep selling 'network investigative techniques' that can bypass default windows defender configurations or whatever the situation is.

From the outside it's hard to know whether MS actually mistreated the researcher badly enough to justify their displeasure(the consensus appears to be that MSRC was never the best to deal with and has actively gone downhill; but this person's position seems significantly angrier than average) or whether they are perhaps wound a little tight; but implying that their legal status is the same as people actively running attacks against user systems is blatantly false and totally ignores the class of researchers who do actively run attacks while being treated as respectable.

It's a particularly bad look when at least Facebook got into a public legal fight with the NSO group over their nerd-merc work against their users; not like that actually solved the problem of attacks on cellphones; but it was an all-too-rare case of industry pushing back against the 'respectable' arms dealers; and not one that MS has an analog to.

Comment Pad destroyed (Score 5, Informative) 71

Pic: https://x.com/asherbphotos/sta...

Word is a second booster at the site in the horizontal integration facility was also destroyed.

Impacts go beyond the rocket and pad. This was development for lunar landers to be launched this year, Leo internet satellites to be launched in the coming days, Blue Moon lunar landers for the Artemis lunar program, and on and on. An engine may have been the cause of the mishap and that casts shade on the Vulcan Centaur that also uses the same engine.

Space

Blue Origin Rocket Exploded Thursday Night During Hot-Fire Test (cbsnews.com) 71

Spaceflight Now shared their video of the explosion, which the Orlando Sentinel describes as showing Blue Origin's rocket "become engulfed in flames. The fireball expands out and covers the entire launch pad as the fuselage of the rocket can be seen crumbling into the flames."

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said on X.com "It's too early to know the root cause but we're already working to find it. Very rough day, but we'll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It's worth it." (SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted "Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly.")

It's unclear how this will impact future launches. "The rocket was destroyed," reports CBS News, "and as the smoke cleared, there was no sign of the erector-gantry used to move the New Glenn from its hangar to the pad and to raise it from horizontal to vertical. Likewise, one of two tall lightning towers was no longer visible." It was the first such on-pad explosion at the Cape since a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up on nearby pad 40 on Sept. 1, 2016... Blue Origin only has one New Glenn pad, the one that was damaged in the Thursday test. The New Glenn, which has launched three times, is a heavy lift rocket designed to compete head-to-head with SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. During New Glenn's most recent flight in April, an upper stage malfunction prevented a commercial internet satellite from reaching its planned orbit...

The New Glenn destroyed Thursday was to send 48 Leo internet satellites owned by Amazon into space [which were not on board for the hot-fire test]

Blue Origin posted on X.com that "Debris from our recent hotfire anomaly may wash ashore in the coming days/weeks. If you encounter any debris, do not touch or approach it for your safety."

"Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult..." NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman posted on X.com. "âWe will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader symbolset for sharing the news.

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