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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 36 declined, 16 accepted (52 total, 30.77% accepted)

Submission + - Mars Perserverance Rover's Parachute Contained Secret Message

rufey writes: The 70 foot parachute used to help NASAS's 2020 Mars Perserverance rover land last week had unusual patterns in its nylon fabric. It turns out it was hiding a slogan. Decoded the slogan is “Dare Mighty Things” — a line from President Theodore Roosevelt — which is a mantra at JPL and adorns many of the center’s walls



Systems engineer Ian Clark used a binary code to spell out “Dare Mighty Things” in the orange and white strips of the 70-foot (21-meter) parachute. He also included the GPS coordinates for the mission’s headquarters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Clark, a crossword hobbyist, came up with the idea two years ago. Engineers wanted an unusual pattern in the nylon fabric to know how the parachute was oriented during descent. Turning it into a secret message was “super fun,” he said Tuesday. Only about six people knew about the encoded message before Thursday’s landing, according to Clark. They waited until the parachute images came back before putting out a teaser during a televised news conference Monday.

Submission + - Changing clocks back or forth 1 hour again 2

rufey writes: Its that time of year again. Millions of people around the world will be adjusting (or have already adjusted) their clocks back or forward one hour, depending on whether you are moving from Summer/Saving time to Standard time or vice versa.

Over the years it is apparent that most people who have spoken about the twice-yearly clock change oppose it. So I ask, why are we still changing clocks in the year 2020?

Submission + - Cell phone location data used to help locate bodies of two deceased children

rufey writes: Earlier this month, the bodies of two children were discovered buried in the backyard of Chad Daybell, the current husband of the childrens' mother, Lori. In the recently released probable cause document released this week, it was revealed that location data obtained from cell phone GPS and tower pings from persons of interest played a large role in both identifying who was probably involved in burying the bodies, and at what times that activity occurred. The location accuracy was apparently sufficient enough to identify two areas of interest in the large backyard, where the two sets of human remains were found.

More information about the case of Lori Daybell's two children can be found here.

Submission + - LetsEncrypt to revoke 3 million certs on March 4th

rufey writes: The free SSL cert provider LetsEncrypt is going to revoke 2.6% of the SSL certs issued by them that are currently active, due to a bug in their backend CA software

From a more detailed article at arsTECHNICA, the bug is in Boulder, the CA software LetsEncrypt uses.

Let's Encrypt uses Certificate Authority software called Boulder. Typically, a Web server that services many separate domain names and uses Let's Encrypt to secure them receives a single LE certificate that covers all domain names used by the server rather than a separate cert for each individual domain.

The bug LE discovered is that, rather than checking each domain name separately for valid CAA records authorizing that domain to be renewed by that server, Boulder would check a single one of the domains on that server n times (where n is the number of LE-serviced domains on that server). Let's Encrypt typically considers domain validation results good for 30 days from the time of validation—but CAA records specifically must be checked no more than eight hours prior to certificate issuance.

The upshot is that a 30-day window is presented in which certificates might be issued to a particular Web server by Let's Encrypt despite the presence of CAA records in DNS that would prohibit that issuance.

The CAB Forum, which oversees the public CA space, has a ticket for this specific issue.

Submission + - Tesla Model S crashes into a stopped truck at a stop light 1

rufey writes: Over the weekend a Tesla vehicle was involved in a crash near Salt Lake City Utah while its Autopilot feature was enabled. The Tesla, a Model S, crashed into the rear end of a fire department utility truck, which was stopped at a red light, at an estimated speed of 60 MPH.

South Jordan police said the Tesla Model S was going 60 mph (97 kph) when it slammed into the back of a fire truck stopped at a red light. The car appeared not to brake before impact, police said. The driver, whom police have not named, was taken to a hospital with a broken foot. The driver of the fire truck suffered whiplash and was not taken to a hospital.

Elon Musk tweeted about the accident:

It’s super messed up that a Tesla crash resulting in a broken ankle is front page news and the ~40,000 people who died in US auto accidents alone in past year get almost no coverage.

What’s actually amazing about this accident is that a Model S hit a fire truck at 60mph and the driver only broke an ankle. An impact at that speed usually results in severe injury or death.

Submission + - Best filesystem to use for external drives? 1

rufey writes: I've recently embarked on a project to rip my DVD and CD collection to a pair of external USB drives. One drive will be used on a daily basis to access the rips of music and DVDs, as well as store backups of all of my other data. The second drive will be a copy of the first drive, to be synced up on a montly basis and kept at a different location. The USB drives that I purchased for this are 1 TB in size and came pre-formatted with FAT32. While I can access this filesystem from all of my Windows and Linux machines, there are some limitations. Namely, the filesize on a FAT32 filesystem is limited to 4 Gb (4 Gb less 1 byte to be technical). I have some files that are well over that size that I want to store, mostly raw DVD video. I'll primarily be using these drives on a Linux based system, and initially, with a Western Digital Live TV media player. I can access a EXT3 filesystem from both of these, and I'm thinking about reformatting to EXT3. But on Windows, it requires a 3rd party driver to access the EXT3 filesystem. NTFS is an option, but the Linux kernel NTFS drivers (according to the kernel build documentation) only has limited NTFS write support, only being safe to overwrite existing files without changing the file size). The Linux-NTFS project (www.linux-ntfs.org) may be able to mitigate my NTFS concerns for Linux, but I haven't had enough experience with it to feel comfortable. At some point I'd like whatever filesystem I use to be accessible to Apple's OS-X.

With those constraints in mind, which filesystem would be the best to use? I realize that there will always be some compatability problems with whatever I end up with. But I'd like to minimize these issues by using a filesystem that has the best multi-OS support for both reading and writing, while at the same time supporting large files.
Power

Submission + - LHC offline until April 2009 (or longer) 1

rufey writes: The recent problems at the Large Hadron Collider will now keep it idle until spring 2009. The official press release is here. The LHC went offline due to a suspected failure in a superconducting connection, which overheated and caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100 degrees. This resulted in the accidental release of a ton of liquid helium. The process required to repair the failed superconducting connection involves weeks of warming up the affected area from -456 degrees Fahrenheit to room temperature, and then several more weeks to cool it back down after the repair is made. The total amount of time to do this will spill over into CERN's scheduled winter maintenance/shutdown period, which is partly done to save money on electricity during the period of peak demand.
Space

Submission + - More solar panel problems for ISS

rufey writes: This week there have been two pieces of bad news from the International Space Station. First was the discovery of metal shavings inside a problematic rotary joint used to keep one set of solar panels in the optimal position for power generation. At the close of a subsequent spacewalk, after it was relocated to its permanent location, the unfurling of the 4B solar panel resulted in it tearing in two places. A spacewalk is now planned for November 4th to attempt to fix the tear. The upcoming spacewalk is not without risks, including the remote possibility of electrocution since it is impossible to stop the solar panel from generating electricity during the repair attempt. NASA says the ripped wing needs to be fixed or the solar rotary joint problem solved before any more shuttles can fly to the space station and continue construction. With a hard deadline of 2010 for Shuttle retirement, NASA does not have much wiggle room in the schedule in order to finish ISS construction.
Privacy

Submission + - HP spying incident included journalists

rufey writes: It is now being reported that the HP boardroom spying incident that occured earlier this year also involved obtaining phone records of journalists from at least two news outlets. MSNBC has the scoop. Journalists from CNET and the Wall Street Journal had their phone records obtained through a method called "pretexting" to see who, if any, of the HP board members the journalists may have been in contact with.

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