Daily Archives: November 12, 2024

LignoSat: First wood-panelled satellite launched into space

Posted on by

The world’s first wood-panelled satellite has been launched into space to test the suitability of timber as a renewable building material in future exploration of destinations like the Moon and Mars.

Made by researchers in Japan, the tiny satellite weighing just 900g is heading for the International Space Station […]. It will then be released into orbit above the Earth.

Named LignoSat, after the Latin word for wood, its panels have been built from a type of magnolia tree, using a traditional technique without screws or glue.

Researchers at Kyoto University who developed it hope it may be possible in the future to replace some metals used in space exploration with wood.

“Wood is more durable in space than on Earth because there’s no water or oxygen that would rot or inflame it,” Kyoto University forest science professor Koji Murata told Reuters news agency.

[…]

Dr Barber said it wasn’t the first time that wood had been used on spacecraft.

“We use wood – cork – on the re-entry, outer shell of vessels of spacecraft to help them survive re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.”

Russian and Soviet lunar landers used cork to help the rover have grip as it was descending to the surface, he added.

“There’s nothing wrong with using wood in space – it’s using the right material for the right task.”

He pointed out that wood has properties that are hard to control.

“So from an engineering point of view it’s quite a difficult material to work with… I think wood’s always going to have a problem to make critical structures like parts of spacecraft where you need to predict how strong it’s going to be.”

The researchers at Kyoto University hope using wood in making spacecraft could also be much less polluting than metal ones when they burn-up on re-entry at the end of their life.

[…]

Source: LignoSat: First wood-panelled satellite launched into space

Corning facing EU antitrust suit over Gorilla Glass seals

Posted on by

Corning’s Gorilla Glass is found in countless tech products, from smartphones and wearables to automobile windshields, and the European Commission has an inkling its success is due in part to the US-based business cutting anticompetitive deals.

The EC announced a formal antitrust investigation into Corning yesterday, accusing the company of abusing its dominant position as a maker of glass screens for mobile electronics, claiming the end result was the exclusion of rival glass manufacturers from the market.

The strategy ultimately caused consumers to pay higher prices, has made repairs tougher and reduced manufacturer innovation, the EC argued.

“It is very frustrating and costly experience to break a mobile phone screen,” said EC competition chief Margrethe Vestager. “Therefore, strong competition in the production of the cover glass used to protect such devices is crucial to ensure low prices and high-quality glass.

“We are investigating if Corning, a major producer of this special glass, may have tried to exclude rival glass producers, thereby depriving consumers from cheaper and more break-resistant glass,” Vestager added.

Gorilla Glass is Corning’s branding for its alkali-aluminosilicate (alkali-AS) glass screens, a chemical composite that’s more break-resistant than other types of glass, making it particularly suited for use on smartphones, wearables, laptops and tablets. Gorilla Glass can be found on devices from manufacturers including Google, Samsung, Sony, Apple and other globally recognized brands.

The Commission is concerned that Corning has abused its position with both mobile OEMs and companies that process raw glass, known as finishers. According to the EC, Corning’s OEM agreements included requirements that companies source their alkali-AS glass exclusively from Corning, for which they would receive rebates, and that OEMs report all competitive offers from rivals to Corning to give it a chance to match the price.

Pertaining to finishers, the EC alleges Corning pressed them into similar sourcing exclusivity obligations, as well as including clauses that prevented finishers from challenging Corning patents.

As this is just an opening of proceedings against Corning, the EC said Corning hasn’t been proven guilty yet. With Corning accused of violating Article 102 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the EU, the business could face fines of up to 10 percent of its annual turnover if found guilty of abusing its market dominance.

Source: Corning facing EU antitrust suit over Gorilla Glass seals • The Register

Plastic pollution is changing entire Earth system, scientists find

Posted on by

[…]

In 2022 at least 506m tonnes of plastics were produced worldwide, but only 9% gets recycled globally. The rest is burned, landfilled or dumped where it can leach into the environment. Microplastics are now everywhere, from the top of Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on earth.

The new study of plastic pollution examined the mounting evidence of the effects of plastics on the environment, health and human wellbeing. The authors are urging delegates at the UN talks to stop viewing plastic pollution as merely a waste problem, and instead to tackle material flows through the whole life pathway of plastic, from raw material extraction, production and use, to its environmental release and its fate, and the Earth system effects.

“It’s necessary to consider the full life cycle of plastics, starting from the extraction of fossil fuel and the primary plastic polymer production” said the article’s lead author, Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, at Stockholm Resilience Centre.

The research team showed that plastics pollution was changing the processes of the entire Earth system, and affected all pressing global environmental problems, including climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and the use of freshwater and land.

“Plastics are seen as those inert products that protect our favourite products, or that make our lives easier that can be “easily cleaned-up” once they become waste,” Villarrubia-Gómez said. “But this is far from reality. Plastics are made out of the combination of thousands of chemicals. Many of them, such as endocrine disruptors and forever chemicals, pose toxicity and harm to ecosystems and human health. We should see plastics as the combination of these chemicals with which we interact on a daily basis.”

[…]

“We now find plastics in the most remote regions of the planet and in the most intimate, within human bodies. And we know that plastics are complex materials, released to the environment throughout the plastics life cycle, resulting in harm in many systems.

“The solutions we strive to develop must be considered with this complexity in mind, addressing the full spectra of safety and sustainability to protect people and the planet.”

Source: Plastic pollution is changing entire Earth system, scientists find | Plastics | The Guardian

Things no one wants: Microsoft rolls out bloated AI-enabled Notepad

Posted on by

Windows Insiders will soon get firsthand experience of Microsoft’s AI ambitions for Paint and Notepad: the image editor is getting Generative Fill and Erase and the text editor is getting a Rewrite function.

We’d been hearing since January that Microsoft Notepad would get an AI makeover – and yesterday it was confirmed Microsoft will roll out a new version of the text editor with generative AI options.

Dubbed “Rewrite,” the function takes a text selection and rewrites it based on the user’s selections of tone, format, and length. So if, for example, a user has text that they think is too wordy or casual, Rewrite will provide three variations they can pick from. Alternatively, the user can opt to revert to the original text.

[…]

Source: Microsoft rolls out AI-enabled Notepad to Windows Insiders • The Register

Notepad was useful because it was small. Very small. And fast. All these extra features slow it down. It should be simple. Bring back wordpad if you want this kind of feature bloat.

Hacker bans thousands of Call of Duty gamers through anti-cheat software, shows how dangerous this poorly written kernel acces junk is.

Posted on by

In October, video game giant Activision said it had fixed a bug in its anti-cheat system that affected “a small number of legitimate player accounts,” who were getting banned because of the bug.

In reality, according to the hacker who found the bug and was exploiting it, they were able to ban “thousands upon thousands” of Call of Duty players, who they essentially framed as cheaters. The hacker, who goes by Vizor, spoke to TechCrunch about the exploit, and told their side of the story.

“I could have done this for years and as long as I target random players and no one famous it would have gone without notice,” said Vizor, who added that it was “funny to abuse the exploit.”

[…]

In 2021, Activision released its Ricochet anti-cheat system, which runs at the kernel level in an attempt to make it even harder for cheat developers to get around it.

Vizor said they were able to find a unique way to exploit Ricochet, and use it against the players it was supposed to protect. The hacker realized Ricochet was using a list of specific hardcoded strings of text as “signatures” to detect hackers. For example, Vizor said, one of the strings was the words “Trigger Bot,” which refers to a type of cheat that automatically triggers a cheater’s weapon when their crosshair is over a target.

Vizor said they could simply send a private message — known as a “whisper” in the game — that included one of these hardcoded strings, such as “Trigger Bot,” and get the player they were messaging banned from the game.

“I realized that Ricochet anti-cheat was likely scanning players’ devices for strings to determine who was a cheater or not. This is fairly normal to do but scanning this much memory space with just an ASCII string and banning off of that is extremely prone to false positives,” said Vizor, referring to how the game was effectively scanning for banned keywords, regardless of context.

[…]

“If you know what signature the anti-cheat is looking for, I find a mechanism to get those bytes in your game process and you get banned,” said the person, who asked to remain anonymous. “I can’t believe [Activision] are banning people on a memory scan of ‘trigger bot.’ That is so incredibly stupid. And they should have been protecting the signatures. That’s amateur hour.”

Apart from random players, Vizor said they targeted some well-known players, too. In the period of time Vizor was using the exploit, some video game streamers posted on X that they had been banned, and then unbanned, once Activision fixed the bug.

The company was alerted of the existence of the bug when Zebleer published details of the exploit on X.

“It was nice to see it get fixed and see unbans,” said Vizor. “I had my fun.”

Source: Hacker says they banned ‘thousands’ of Call of Duty gamers by abusing anti-cheat flaw | TechCrunch

What this article misses is that anti-cheat programs have kernel level access to your system. This means that they are able to not only read anything anywhere on your system, but they are also able to alter whatever they like on your system. It’s not just spyware, but a potential virus or ransomware application just waiting to be hijacked. The ease with which this was exploited shows how dangerous these programs are. Expect more exploits through this route, as they are coded extremely poorly, apparently.