Well now why would I want a single-button keyboard, you might be asking yourself. We say it all depends on how you build the thing, and how you program it. Would you believe that the MagiClick by [Modular] is capable of showing live weather information or the date and time, acting as animated dice, or being a stopwatch and Pomodoro timer? Now you’re beginning to understand.
Before we get much further, yes, this bad boy has two additional buttons on the sides. But the spirit of the thing is in the single large switch in the middle. It’s hiding beneath the 0.85″ 128×128 display, which is protected from pressure and fingerprints by that Pop-o-Matic bubble over the top. While the big button is the main operator used to access the function options, the side buttons are used as auxiliaries to exit and return to the home screen.
MagiClick is based on the ESP32-S3 and is designed to run on CircuitPython. In addition to everything else packed into this thing, there are blinkenlights and a small speaker inside, plus a GPIO expansion header around back. Everything is available on GitHub if you want to build your own.
A chip startup and several of its employees are being sued by Apple for theft of trade secrets and breach of contract and filed a countersuit.
Rivos was sued [PDF] by Apple early last year over claims it lured away a gaggle of Apple employees working on the system-on-chip (SoC) designs like those in its Mac and iPhone devices. Rivos and several of its employees who previously worked at Apple were named in the suit, and six of them participated with Rivos in the countersuit [PDF] filed in the District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday.
In the original lawsuit, Apple accused Rivos, which was founded in 2021 to develop RISC-V SoCs for servers, of a “coordinated campaign to target Apple employees with access to Apple proprietary and trade secret information about Apple’s SoC designs.” When informed of confidentiality and intellectual property agreements (IPAs), Apple claimed Rivos never responded.
Instead, “after accepting their offers from Rivos, some of these employees took gigabytes of sensitive SoC specifications and design files during their last days of employment with Apple,” lawyers for Cupertino alleged.
A judge in the lawsuit dismissed [PDF] claims of trade secret theft against Rivos and two of its employees in August with leave to amend, but let other Defend Trade Secrets Act claims against individual employees, as well as the breach of contract claims, stand.
Apple has tried this before and failed, reasons Rivos
In its countersuit, Rivos and six of its employees argue that, rather than competing, “Apple has resorted to trying to thwart emerging startups through anticompetitive measures, including illegally restricting employee mobility.”
Methods Apple has used to stymie employee mobility include the aforementioned IPAs, which Rivos lawyers argue violate California’s Business and Professions Code rules voiding contracts that restrict an individual’s ability to engage in a lawful business, profession or trade.
Under California law, Rivos lawyers claim, such a violation means Apple is engaging in unfair and unlawful business practices that have caused injury to Rivos through the need to fight such a lengthy and, if the contracts are unenforceable, unnecessary court battle.
“Apple’s actions not only violate the laws and public policy of the State of California, but also undermine the free and open competition that has made the state the birthplace of countless innovative businesses,” Rivos’s lawyers argue in the lawsuit.
Rivos also claims that Apple’s method of applying its IPA is piecemeal and often abused to allow Apple future legal opportunities.
“Even when Apple knows its employees are leaving to work somewhere that Apple (rightly or wrongly) perceives as a competitive threat, it does not consistently conduct exit interviews or give employees any meaningful instruction about what they should do with supposedly ‘confidential’ Apple material upon leaving,” the countersuit claims.
“Apple lets these employees walk out the door with material they may have inadvertently ‘retained’ simply by using the Apple systems (such as iCloud or iMessage) that Apple effectively mandates they use as part of their work.”
Rivos argues in its filing that Apple tried this exact same scheme before and it failed then too.
That incident involved Arm-compatible chipmaker Nuvia, which was founded by former Apple chip chief Gerard Williams in 2019. Apple sued Williams that same year over claims he violated his contract with Apple and tried to poach employees for his startup.
Williams unsurprisingly made the same claims as Rivos – that the Apple contracts were unenforceable under California law – and after a couple years of stalling, Apple finally abandoned its suit against Williams with little justification.
The iGiant didn’t respond to our questions about the countersuit.
The FTC – and 17 state attorneys general – have come out swinging at Amazon with a lawsuit accusing the ecommerce giant of being a monopolist.
Amazon, the FTC alleges, engages in anticompetitive conduct in two markets: online ecommerce and also the market for marketplace services used by sellers. The tactics used by Amazon to thwart competition include anti-discounting measures that punish sellers for offering prices lower than Amazons, and requiring vendors to use – and pay for – Amazon’s fulfillment services to make their products eligible for free Prime shipments, the FTC claims.
“Our complaint lays out how Amazon has used a set of punitive and coercive tactics to unlawfully maintain its monopolies,” said FTC Chair and perennial Amazon opponent Lina Khan.
Khan describes Amazon’s as exploiting monopolistic power to enrich itself by raising product prices and degrading services for its customers and businesses. “Today’s lawsuit seeks to hold Amazon to account for these monopolistic practices and restore the lost promise of free and fair competition,” Khan added.
Amazon’s “monopoly rents” are extracted from “everyone within its reach,” the FTC alleges. This hurts customers by replacing relevant organic search results with ads and boosting Amazon’s own products in search results. In addition, excessive fees are allegedly leveled at Amazon sellers, which the FTC said can amount to close to half of a store’s revenue going directly to the online souk, and which it asserts are passed on to consumers.
[…]
“We can and should break up Amazon,” said Athena Coalition, a self-described anti-Amazon grassroots group, in a statement. “Amazon has a long history of combining and utilizing its many businesses together as an integrated whole to leverage its power against workers, businesses, and ultimately all of us.”
The group said that an FTC victory would free Amazon sellers to work with whomever they chose, rather than being forced to go to Amazon. Rather than harming consumers, Athena said that an Amazon reigned in by the FTC would also mean more choice and lower costs for Amazon customers, too.
Today’s story is about Philips Hue by Signify. They will soon start forcing accounts on all users and upload user data to their cloud. For now, Signify says you’ll still be able to control your Hue lights locally as you’re currently used to, but we don’t know if this may change in the future. The privacy policy allows them to store the data and share it with partners.
[…]
When you open the Philips Hue app you will now be prompted with a new message: Starting soon, you’ll need to be signed in.
[…]
So today, you can choose to not share your information with Signify by not creating an account. But this choice will soon be taken away and all users need to share their data with Philips Hue.
Confirming the news
I didn’t want to cry wolf, so I decided to verify the above statement with Signify. They sadly confirmed:
Twitter conversation with Philips Hue (source: Twitter)
When asked what drove this change, the answer is the usual: security. Well Signify, you know what keeps user data even more secure? Not uploading it all to your cloud.
[…]
As a user, we encourage you to reach out to Signify support and voice your concern.
NOTE: Their support form doesn’t work. You can visit their Facebook page though
Dear Signify, please reconsider your decision and do not move forward with it. You’ve reversed bad decisions before. People care about privacy and forcing accounts will hurt the brand in the long term. The pain caused by this is not worth the gain.
No, Philips / Signify – I have used these devices for years without having to have an account or be connected to the internet. It’s one of the reasons I bought into Hue. Making us give up data to use something we bought after we bought it is a dangerous decision considering the private and exploitable nature of the data, as well as greedy and rude.
American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and United Airlines are among a growing list of air carriers that have grounded aircraft in the wake of a fake jet engine parts scandal that has rocked the aviation industry. Multiple have already replaced the uncertified parts and returned their planes to service, but close to 100 planes may still be affected worldwide.
Earlier this month, news broke that British aerospace parts supplier AOG Technics had forged certification documents for dozens of parts used in the CFM56 turbofan. This is the world’s most widely used jet engine, powering workhorses like the Airbus A320 and Boeing 737. The origin of the fake parts isn’t yet known, but some of their destinations are: The engines of at least four airlines around the globe.
Citing Bloomberg, Simple Flying reports Southwest Airlines was the first to find AOG parts in its aircraft. It traced its supply chain to the installation of two AOG-supplied low-pressure turbine blades in a 737, which it replaced on September 8 with certified parts before returning the Boeing to service. Virgin Australia reportedly later found and replaced the same part, along with a seal on an inner high-pressure turbine nozzle.
American Airlines also tracked down AOG parts on what a spokesperson reportedly described as “a small number of aircraft” during “internal audits,” leading to the planes being “immediately taken out of service.” United Airlines also reportedly found AOG-sourced compressor stator vanes on two of its planes, though whether those two planes have returned to service was not indicated.
AOG’s uncertified parts are currently believed to have made their way into as many as 96 planes worldwide. The Federal Aviation Administration has advised airlines and the rest of the aerospace industry to inspect their planes and audit inventories for uncertified, AOG-supplied parts.
Ken Loach’s 1977 film ‘Star Wars Episode IV – No Hope’.
George Lucas was unhappy with Loach’s depressing subject matter combined with there being no actual space scenes (with all the action taking place on a UK council estate).
He immediately halted filming, recast many parts (Carrie Fisher replacing Kathy Burke for example), did extensive reshoots, and released his more family-friendly cut under new name ‘A New Hope’ (whatever that means!!)
[…]a Reddit user named “Ugleh” posted an AI-generated image of a spiral-shaped medieval village that rapidly gained attention on social media for its remarkable geometric qualities. Follow-up posts garnered even more praise, including a tweet with over 145,000 likes. Ugleh created the images using Stable Diffusion and a guidance technique called ControlNet.
[….]
In June, we covered a technique that used the AI image synthesis model Stable Diffusion and ControlNet to create QR codes that look like rich artworks, including anime-inspired art. Ugleh took the same neural network optimized for creating those QR codes (which themselves are geometric shapes) and fed simple images of spirals and checkerboard patterns into it instead.
When guided by the prompt, “Medieval village scene with busy streets and castle in the distance (masterpiece:1.4), (best quality), (detailed),” ControlNet rendered scenes where artistic elements of the images match the perceptual shapes of spirals and checkerboards. In one image, the clouds arc overhead and people stand in a gentle curve to match the spiral guidance. In another, squares of clouds, hedges, building faces, and a wagon cart make up a checkerboard-shaped scene.
The magic of ControlNet
So how does it work? We’ve covered Stable Diffusion frequently before. It’s a neural network model trained on millions of images scraped from the Internet. But the key here is ControlNet, which first appeared in a research paper titled “Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models” by Lvmin Zhang, Anyi Rao, and Maneesh Agrawala in February 2023, and quickly became popular in the Stable Diffusion community.
Typically, a Stable Diffusion image is created using a text prompt (called text2image) or an image prompt (img2img). ControlNet introduces additional guidance that can take the form of extracted information from a source image, including pose detection, depth mapping, normal mapping, edge detection, and much more. Using ControlNet, someone generating AI artwork can much more closely replicate the shape or pose of a subject in an image.
Using ControlNet and similar prompts, it’s easy to replicate Ugleh’s work, and others have done so to amusing effect, including checkerboard anime characters, an animation, medieval village “goatse” (surprisingly safe for work), and a medieval village version of “Girl with a Pearl Earring.”
[…]
If you want to experiment with ControlNet, this site has a good tutorial. Also, Ugleh posted a step-by-step workflow, including the spiral and checkerboard template files, on Imgur.
While the artwork is remarkable, current US copyright policy suggests that the images do not meet the standards to receive copyright protection, so they may be in the public domain. While AI-generated artwork is still a contentious subject for many on ethical and legal grounds, creative enthusiasts continue to push the boundaries of what is possible for an unskilled or untrained practitioner using these new tools.
[…] Have I Been Pwned started life as a hobby project. In fact, Troy wasn’t working in the cybersecurity industry until a chance encounter tweaked his curiosity.
[…]
Hackers had stolen the email addresses and passwords of 152 million of Adobe’s customers in November 2013 — including, as it turned out, Troy’s.
Only, he wasn’t an Adobe customer. He did some digging and found that Adobe had acquired another company that he did have an account with, and his data along with it.
But that wasn’t where it ended. Another question weighed on Troy’s mind — one he would soon become synonymous with. Where else had his data been leaked?
So, two months after the Adobe breach, he launched Have I Been Pwned — a website that would answer this exact question for anyone in the world.
Even though it’s grown into an industry behemoth, the day-to-day reality of running the site hasn’t changed all that much since 2013.
[…]
He only collects (and encrypts) the mobile numbers, emails and passwords that he finds in the breaches, discarding the victims’ names, physical addresses, bank details and other sensitive information.
The idea is to let users find out where their data has been leaked from, but without exposing them to further risk.
Once he identifies where a data breach has occurred, Troy also contacts the organisation responsible to allow it to inform its users before he does. This, he says, is often the hardest step of the process because he has to convince them it’s legitimate and not some kind of scam itself.
He’s not required to give organisations this opportunity, much less persist when they ignore his messages or accuse him of trying to shake them down for money.
[…]
These days, major tech companies like Mozilla and 1Password use Have I Been Pwned, and Troy likes to point out that dozens of national governments and law enforcement agencies also partner with his service.
[…]
the reality is Troy doesn’t answer to an electorate, or even a board.
“He’s not a company that’s audited. He’s just a dude on the web,” says Jane Andrew, an expert on data breaches at the University of Sydney.
“I think it’s so shocking that this is where we find out information about ourselves.
“It’s just one guy facilitating this. It’s a critical global risk.”
She says governments and law enforcement have, in general, left it to individuals to deal with the fallout from data breaches.
[…]
Without an effective global regulator, Professor Andrew says, a crucial part of the world’s cybersecurity infrastructure is left to rely on the goodwill of this one man on the Gold Coast.
T-Mobile US has had another bad week on the infosec front – this time stemming from a system glitch that exposed customer account data, followed by allegations of another breach the carrier denied.
According to customers who complained of the issue on Reddit and X, the T-Mobile app was displaying other customers’ data instead of their own – including the strangers’ purchase history, credit card information, and address.
This being T-Mobile’s infamously leaky US operation, people immediately began leaping to the obvious conclusion: another cyber attack or breach.
“There was no cyber attack or breach at T-Mobile,” the telco assured us in an emailed statement. “This was a temporary system glitch related to a planned overnight technology update involving limited account information for fewer than 100 customers, which was quickly resolved.”
Note, as Reddit poster Jman100_JCMP did, T-Mobile means fewer than 100 customers had their data exposed – but far more appear to have been able to view those 100 customers’ data.
As for the breach, the appearance of exposed T-Mobile data was alleged by malware repository vx-underground’s X (Twitter) account. The Register understands T-Mobile examined the data and determined that independently owned T-Mobile dealer, Connectivity Source, was the source – resulting from a breach it suffered in April. We understand T-Mobile believes vx-underground misinterpreted a data dump.
Connectivity Source was indeed the subject of a breach in April, in which an unknown attacker made off with employee data including names and social security numbers – around 17,835 of them from across the US, where Connectivity appears to do business exclusively as a white-labelled T-Mobile US retailer.
Looks like the carier really dodged the bullet on this one – there’s no way Connectivity Source employees could be mistaken for its own staff.
T-Mobile US has already experienced two prior breaches this year, but that hasn’t imperilled the biz much – its profits have soared recently and some accompanying sizable layoffs will probably keep things in the black for the foreseeable future.
Since 1999, Slashdot hasbeencoveringtheannualIgNobelprize ceremonies — which honor real scientific research into strange or surprising subjects. “Each winner (or winning team) has done something that makes people LAUGH, then THINK,” explains the ceremony web page, promising that “a gaggle of genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel laureates handed the Ig Nobel Prizes to the new Ig Nobel winners.” As co-founder Marc Abrahams says on his LinkedIn profile, “All these things celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.”
COMMUNICATION PRIZE [ARGENTINA, SPAIN, COLOMBIA, CHILE, CHINA, USA] — María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward.
EDUCATION PRIZE [HONG KONG, CHINA, CANADA, UK, THE NETHERLANDS, IRELAND, USA, JAPAN] — Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.
PHYSICS PRIZE [SPAIN, GALICIA, SWITZERLAND, FRANCE, UK] — Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.
It’s hard to read the headlines today without feeling like the world couldn’t possibly get much worse. And then tomorrow rolls around, and a fresh set of headlines puts the lie to that thought. On a macro level, there’s not much that you can do about that, but on a personal level, illustrating your news feed with mostly wrong, AI-generated images might take the edge off things a little.
Let us explain. [Roy van der Veen] liked the idea of an e-paper display newsfeed, but the crushing weight of the headlines was a little too much to bear. To lighten things up, he decided to employ Stable Diffusion to illustrate his feed, displaying both the headline and a generated image on a 7.3″ Inky 7-color e-paper display. Every five hours, a script running on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W fetches a headline from a random source — we’re pleased the list includes Hackaday — and composes a prompt for Stable Diffusion based on the headline, adding on a randomly selected prefix and suffix to spice things up. For example, a prompt might look like, “Gothic painting of (Driving a Motor with an Audio Amp Chip). Gloomy, dramatic, stunning, dreamy.” You can imagine the results.
We have to say, from the examples [Roy] shows, the idea pretty much works — sometimes the images are so far off the mark that just figuring out how Stable Diffusion came up with them is enough to soften the blow. We’d have preferred if the news of the floods in Libya had been buffered by a slightly less dismal scene, but finding out that what was thought to be a “ritual mass murder” was really only a yoga class was certainly heartening.
At this point, you gotta figure that you’re at least being listened to almost everywhere you go, whether it be a home assistant or your very own phone. So why not roll with the punches and turn lemons into something like a still life of lemons that’s a bit wonky? What we mean is, why not take our conversations and use AI to turn them into art? That’s the idea behind this next-generation digital photo frame created by [TheMorehavoc].
Essentially, it uses a Raspberry Pi and a Respeaker four-mic array to listen to conversations in the room. It listens and records 15-20 seconds of audio, and sends that to the OpenWhisper API to generate a transcript.
This repeats until five minutes of audio is collected, then the entire transcript is sent through GPT-4 to extract an image prompt from a single topic in the conversation. Then, that prompt is shipped off to Stable Diffusion to get an image to be displayed on the screen. As you can imagine, the images generated run the gamut from really weird to really awesome.
The natural lulls in conversation presented a bit of a problem in that the transcription was still generating during silences, presumably because of ambient noise. The answer was in voice activity detection software that gives a probability that a voice is present.
Naturally, people were curious about the prompts for the images, so [TheMorehavoc] made a little gallery sign with a MagTag that uses Adafruit.io as the MQTT broker. Build video is up after the break, and you can check out the images here (warning, some are NSFW).
The European Commission has imposed a €376.36 million ($400 million) fine on Intel for blocking the sales of devices powered by its competitors’ x86 CPUs. This brings one part of the company’s long-running antitrust court battle with the European authority to a close. If you’ll recall, the Commission slapped the chipmaker with a record-breaking €1.06 billion ($1.13 billion) fine in 2009 after it had determined that Intel abused its dominant position in the market. ye
It found back then that the company gave hidden rebates and incentives to manufacturers like HP, Dell and Lenovo for buying all or almost all their processors from Intel. The Commission also found that Intel paid manufacturers to delay or to completely cease the launch of products powered by its rivals’ CPUs “naked restrictions.” Other times, Intel apparently paid companies to limit those products’ sales channels. The Commission calls these actions “naked restrictions.”
[…]
In its announcement, the European Commission gave a few examples of how Intel hindered the sales of competing products. It apparently paid HP between November 2002 and May 2005 to sell AMD-powered business desktops only to small- and medium-sized enterprises and via direct distribution channels. It also paid Acer to delay the launch of an AMD-based notebook from September 2003 to January 2004. Intel paid Lenovo to push back the launch of AMD-based notebooks for half a year, as well.
The Commission has since appealed the General Court’s decision to dismiss the part of the case related to the rebates Intel offered its clients. Intel, however, did not lodge an appeal for the court’s ruling on naked restrictions, setting it in stone. “With today’s decision, the Commission has re-imposed a fine on Intel only for its naked restrictions practice,” the European authority wrote. “The fine does not relate to Intel’s conditional rebates practice. The fine amount, which is based on the same parameters as the 2009 Commission’s decision, reflects the narrower scope of the infringement compared to that decision.” Seeing as the rebates part of the case is under appeal, Intel could still pay the rest of the fine in the future.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has racked up an impressive list of superlatives in its first five years of operations: It’s the closest spacecraft to the sun, the fastest human-made object and the first mission to ever “touch the sun.”
Now, Parker has one more feather to add to its sun-kissed cap: It’s the first spacecraft ever to fly through a powerful solar explosion near the sun.
As detailed in a new study published Sept. 5 in The Astrophysical Journal—exactly one year after the event occurred—Parker Solar Probe passed through a coronal mass ejection (CME).
These fierce eruptions can expel magnetic fields and sometimes billions of tons of plasma at speeds ranging from 60 to 1,900 miles (100 to 3,000 kilometers) per second. When directed toward Earth, these ejections can bend and mold our planet’s magnetic field, generating spectacular auroral shows and, if strong enough, potentially devastate satellite electronics and electrical grids on the ground.
Cruising on the far side of the sun just 5.7 million miles (9.2 million kilometers) from the solar surface—22.9 million miles (36.8 million kilometers) closer than Mercury ever gets to the sun—Parker Solar Probe first detected the CME remotely before skirting along its flank. The spacecraft later passed into the structure, crossing the wake of its leading edge (or shock wave), and then finally exited through the other side.
A composite of images collected by Parker Solar Probe’s Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument captures the moment the spacecraft passed through a coronal mass ejection (CME) on Sept. 5, 2022. The event becomes visible at 0:14 seconds. The sun, depicted on the left, comes closest on Sept. 6, when Parker reached its 13th perihelion. The sound in the background is magnetic field data converted into audio. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory/Brendan Gallagher/Guillermo Stenborg/Emmanuel Masongsong/Lizet Casillas/Robert Alexander/David Malaspina
In all, the sun-grazing spacecraft spent nearly two days observing the CME, providing physicists an unparalleled view into these stellar events and an opportunity to study them early in their evolution.
“This is the closest to the sun we’ve ever observed a CME,” said Nour Raouafi, the Parker Solar Probe project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, which built the spacecraft within NASA’s timeline and budget, and currently manages and operates the mission. “We’ve never seen an event of this magnitude at this distance.”
The CME on Sept. 5, 2022, was an extreme one. As Parker passed behind the shock wave, its Solar Wind Electrons, Alphas and Protons (SWEAP) instrument suite clocked particles accelerating up to 840 miles (1,350 kilometers) per second. Had it been directed toward Earth, Raouafi suspects it would have been close in magnitude to the Carrington Event—a solar storm in 1859 that is held as the most powerful on record to hit Earth.
[…]
More information: O. M. Romeo et al, Near-Sun In Situ and Remote-sensing Observations of a Coronal Mass Ejection and its Effect on the Heliospheric Current Sheet, The Astrophysical Journal (2023). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ace62e
A recent study submitted to Acta Astronautica explores the potential for using aerographite solar sails for traveling to Mars and interstellar space, which could dramatically reduce both the time and fuel required for such missions. This study comes while ongoing research into the use of solar sails is being conducted by a plethora of organizations along with the successful LightSail2 mission by The Planetary Society, and holds the potential to develop faster and more efficient propulsion systems for long-term space missions.
“Solar sail propulsion has the potential for rapid delivery of small payloads (sub-kilogram) throughout the solar system,” Dr. René Heller, who is an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and a co-author on the study, tells Universe Today. “Compared to conventional chemical propulsion, which can bring hundreds of tons of payload to low-Earth orbit and deliver a large fraction of that to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, this sounds ridiculously small. But the key value of solar sail technology is speed.”
Unlike conventional rockets, which rely on fuel in the form of a combustion of chemicals to exert an external force out the back of the spacecraft, solar sails don’t require fuel. Instead, they use sunlight for their propulsion mechanism, as the giant sails catch solar photons much like wind sails catching the wind when traveling across water. The longer the solar sails are deployed, the more solar photons are captured, which gradually increases the speed of the spacecraft.
For the study, the researchers conducted simulations on how fast a solar sail made of aerographite with a mass up to 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds), including 720 grams of aerographite with a cross-sectional area of 104 square meters, could reach Mars and the interstellar medium, also called the heliopause, using two trajectories from Earth known as direct outward transfer and inward transfer methods, respectively.
The direct outward transfer method for both the trip to Mars and the heliopause involved the solar sail both deploying and departing directly from a polar orbit around the Earth. The researchers determined that Mars being in opposition (directly opposite Earth from the Sun) at the time of solar sail deployment and departure from Earth would yield the best results for both velocity and travel time. This same polar orbit deployment and departure was also used for the heliopause trajectory, as well. For the inward transfer method, the solar sail would be delivered to approximately 0.6 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun via traditional chemical rockets, where the solar sail would deploy and begin its journey to either Mars or the heliopause. But how does an aerographite solar sail make this journey more feasible?
Image taken by The Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 on 25 November 2019 during its mission orbiting the Earth. The curved appearance of the sails is from the spacecraft’s 185-degree fisheye camera lens, and the image was processed with color-correction along with removal of parts of the distortion. (Credit: The Planetary Society)
“With its low density of 0.18 kilograms per cubic meter, aerographite undercuts all conventional solar sail materials,” Julius Karlapp, who is a Research Assistant at the Dresden University of Technology and lead author of the study, tells Universe Today. “Compared to Mylar (a metallized polyester foil), for example, the density is four orders of magnitude smaller. Assuming that the thrust developed by a solar sail is directly dependent on the mass of the sail, the resulting thrust force is much higher. In addition to the acceleration advantage, the mechanical properties of aerographite are amazing.”
Through these simulations, the researchers found the direct outward transfer method and inward transfer method resulted in the solar sail reaching Mars in 26 days and 126 days, respectively, with the first 103 days being the travel time from Earth to the deployment point at 0.6 AU. For the journey to the heliopause, both methods resulted in 5.3 years and 4.2 years, respectively, with the first 103 days of the inward transfer method also being devoted to the travel time from the Earth to the deployment point at 0.6 AU, as well. The reason the heliopause is reached in a faster time with the inward transfer method is due to the solar sail achieving maximum speed at 300 days, as opposed to achieving maximum speed with the outward transfer method at approximately 2 years.
Current travel times to Mars range between 7-9 months, which only happens during specified launch windows every two years while relying on the positions of both planets to be aligned at both launch and arrival of any spacecraft going to, or coming from, Mars. Estimating current travel times to the heliopause can be done using NASA’s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes, which reached the heliopause at approximately 35 years and 41 years, respectively.
The researchers note that one major question of using solar sails is deceleration, or slowing down, upon arriving at the destination, specifically Mars, and while they mention aerocapture as one solution, they admit this still requires further study.
“Aerocapture maneuvers for hyperbolic trajectories (like flying from Earth to Mars) use the atmosphere to gradually reduce velocity due to drag,” Dr. Martin Tajmar, who is a physicist and Professor of Space System at the Dresden University of Technology and a co-author on the study, tells Universe Today. “Therefore, less fuel is required to enter the Martian orbit. We use this braking maneuver to eliminate the need for additional braking thrusters, which in turn reduces the mass of the spacecraft. We’re currently researching what alternative strategies might work for us. Yet the braking method is only one of many different challenges we are currently facing.”
While solar sail technology has been proposed by NASA as far back as the 1970s, a recent example of solar sail technology is the NASA Solar Cruiser, which is currently scheduled to launch in February 2025.
What new discoveries will researchers make about solar sail technology in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
OSIRIS-REx weighs 4,650 pounds (or 2,110 kg). On September 8th of 2016, NASA first launched the spacecraft on its 3.8-billion mile mission to land on an asteroid and retrieve a sample.
That sample has just returned.
Throughout Sunday morning, NASA tweeted historic updates from the sample’s landing site in Utah. “We’ve spotted the #OSIRISREx capsule on the ground,” they announced about 80 minutes ago (including a 23-second video clip). “The parachute has separated, and the helicopters are arriving at the site. We’re ready to recover that sample!”
UPI notes that the capsule “reached temperatures up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit during reentry, so protective masks and gloves are required to handle it,” describing its payload as “a 250-gram dust sample.”
15 minutes later NASA shared footage of “the first persons to come into contact with this hardware since it was on the other side of the solar system.” A recovery team approached the capsule to perform an environmental safety sweep confirming there were no hazardous gas.
“The impossible became possible,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. The Guardian reports he confirmed the capsule “brought something extraordinary — the largest asteroid sample ever received on Earth.
“It’s going to help scientists investigate planet formation, it’s going to improve our understanding of the asteroids that could possibly impact the earth and it will deepen our understanding of the origin of our solar system and its formation.”
“This mission proves that NASA does big things, things that have inspired us, things that unite us…
“The mission continues with incredible science and analysis to come. But I want to thank you all, for everybody that made this Osiris-Rex mission possible.”
Professor Neil Bowles of the University of Oxford, one of the scientists who will study the sample, told the Guardian that he was excited to see the sample heading to the clean room at Johnson Space Center. “So much new science to come!”
And that 4,650-pound spacecraft is still hurtling through space. 20 minutes after delivering its sample, the craft ” fired its engines to divert past Earth toward its new mission to asteroid Apophis,” NASA reports. The name of its new mission? OSIRIS-APEX. Roughly 1,000 feet wide, Apophis will come within 20,000 miles of Earth — less than one-tenth the distance between Earth and the Moon — in 2029. OSIRIS-APEX is scheduled to enter orbit of Apophis soon after the asteroid’s close approach of Earth to see how the encounter affected the asteroid’s orbit, spin rate, and surface.
Amazon has always handled its streaming video slate a little differently than the competition. Other companies have slyly introduced a cheaper ad-free option while slowly raising prices on non-ad-based subscription tiers, Prime Video is taking a different tack. The streaming service plans to hold ad-free watching hostage, and it’s demanding a $3 ransom starting early next year.
In a Friday release, Amazon said it would start adding “limited advertisements” to Prime Video starting out in 2024. The company promised fewer ads than other streaming TV providers or old-school linear TV. This change will impact all users in the U.S., UK, Germany, and Canada. Other regions won’t have long to savor the lack of ads, as eventually more places like France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia will all have ads shoved in front of their unwilling eyeballs.
But don’t worry, all you have to do to help ignore all the ads is slip Amazon an extra $3 a month for a new ad-free option, at least for U.S. Prime members. That bumps the monthly cost of Prime to $18 from $15 a month. Users should get a message in their emails about how they can sign up for Amazon’s latest penny-pinching plan several weeks before ads start flooding Prime Video.
The Dutch Data Protection Foundation (SDBN) wants to enforce a mass claim for 11 million people through the courts against social media company X, the former Twitter. Between 2013 and 2021, that company owned the advertising platform MoPub, which, according to the privacy foundation, illegally traded in data from users of more than 30,000 free apps such as Wordfeud, Buienradar and Duolingo.
SDBN has been trying to reach an agreement with X since November last year, but according to the foundation, without success. That is why SDBN is now starting a lawsuit at the Rotterdam court. Central to this is MoPub’s handling of personal data such as religious beliefs, sexual orientation and health. In addition to compensation, SDBN wants this data to be destroyed.
The foundation also believes that users are entitled to profit contributions. A lot of money can be made by sharing personal data with thousands of companies, says SDBN chairman Anouk Ruhaak. Although she says it is difficult to find out exactly which companies had access to the data. “By holding X. Corp liable, we hope not only to obtain compensation for all victims, but also to put a stop to this type of practice,” said Ruhaak. “Unfortunately, these types of companies often only listen when it hurts financially.”
Alphabet’s Google pays more than $10 billion a year to maintain its position as the default search engine on web browsers and mobile devices, stifling competition, the US Justice Department said Tuesday at the start of a high-stakes antitrust trial in Washington. From a report: “This case is about the future of the internet and whether Google’s search engine will ever face meaningful competition,” Kenneth Dintzer, a government lawyer, said in his opening statement. “The evidence will show they demanded default exclusivity to block rivals.” Dintzer said Google became a monopoly by at least 2010 and today controls more than 89% of the online search market.
“The company pays billions for defaults because they are uniquely powerful,” he said. “For the last 12 years, Google has abused its monopoly in general search.” The monopolization trial is the first pitting the federal government against a US technology company in more than two decades. The Justice Department and 52 attorneys general from states and US territories allege Google illegally maintained its monopoly by paying billions to tech rivals, smartphone makers and wireless providers in exchange for being set as the preselected option or default on mobile phones and web browsers.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group claimed responsibility for the MGM Resorts cyber outage on Tuesday, according to a post by malware archive vx-underground. The group claims to have used common social engineering tactics, or gaining trust from employees to get inside information, to try and get a ransom out of MGM Resorts, but the company reportedly refuses to pay. The conversation that granted initial access took just 10 minutes, according to the group.
“All ALPHV ransomware group did to compromise MGM Resorts was hop on LinkedIn, find an employee, then call the Help Desk,” the organization wrote in a post on X. Those details came from ALPHV, but have not been independently confirmed by security researchers. The international resort chain started experiencing outages earlier this week, as customers noticed slot machines at casinos owned by MGM Resorts shut down on the Las Vegas strip. As of Wednesday morning, MGM Resorts still shows signs that it’s experiencing downtime, like continued website disruptions. In a statement on Tuesday, MGM Resorts said: “Our resorts, including dining, entertainment and gaming are currently operational.” However, the company said Wednesday that the cyber incident has significantly disrupted properties across the United States and represents a material risk to the company.
“[T]he major credit rating agency Moody’s warned that the cyberattack could negatively affect MGM’s credit rating, saying the attack highlighted ‘key risks’ within the company,” reports CNBC. “The company’s corporate email, restaurant reservation and hotel booking systems remain offline as a result of the attack, as do digital room keys. MGM on Wednesday filed a 8-K report with the Securities and Exchange Commission noting that on Tuesday the company issued a press release ‘regarding a cybersecurity issue involving the Company.'” MGM’s share price has declined more than 6% since Monday.
These Mymanu CLIK S are a pair of bluetooth earbuds that pair with an app on your phone to offer live translations of over 37 languages, including Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, Thai, Korean, and Japanese. The earbuds cost $157, and the app is included.
Obviously, these earbuds can be ideal for international travelers. They use an exclusive translation app called MyJuno, which is also where you can see the full list of translatable languages.
The CLIK S can translate for individual or group speakers, but only individual speakers get their translations played live in your earbud. You just select the relevant languages in the app, then hold the button on your earbud when you want to talk. A translation will be visible on your phone and will play audibly. When your conversation partner wants to talk, they just speak into your phone. For groups of speakers, the CLIK S will keep a written log of the conversation.
Fully charged, these earbuds can last for up to 10 hours, and the charging case can extend that to 30 hours. You can get the Mymanu CLIK S Translation Earbuds for $157, though prices can change at any time.
On the morning of his arrest, Grigor Sargsyan was still fixing matches. Four cellphones buzzed on his nightstand with calls and messages from around the world.
Sargsyan was sprawled on a bed in his parents’ apartment, making deals between snatches of sleep. It was 3 a.m. in Brussels, which meant it was 8 a.m. in Thailand. The W25 Hua Hin tournament was about to start.
Sargsyan was negotiating with professional tennis players preparing for their matches, athletes he had assiduously recruited over years. He needed them to throw a game or a set — or even just a point — so he and a global network of associates could place bets on the outcomes.
That’s how Sargsyan had become rich. As gambling on tennis exploded into a $50 billion industry, he had infiltrated the sport, paying pros more to lose matches, or parts of matches, than they could make by winning tournaments.
Sargsyan had crisscrossed the globe building his roster, which had grown to include more than 180 professional players across five continents. It was one of the biggest match-fixing rings in modern sports, large enough to earn Sargsyan a nickname whispered throughout the tennis world: the Maestro.
This Washington Post investigation of Sargsyan’s criminal enterprise, and how the changing nature of gambling has corrupted tennis, is based on dozens of interviews with players, coaches, investigators, tennis officials and match fixers.
Specifically, the web giant’s Privacy Sandbox APIs, a set of ad delivery and analysis technologies, now function in the latest version of the Chrome browser. Website developers can thus write code that calls those APIs to deliver and measure ads to visitors with compatible browsers.
That is to say, sites can ask Chrome directly what kinds of topics you’re interested in – topics automatically selected by Chrome from your browsing history – so that ads personalized to your activities can be served. This is supposed to be better than being tracked via third-party cookies, support for which is being phased out. There are other aspects to the sandbox that we’ll get to.
While Chrome is the main vehicle for Privacy Sandbox code, Microsoft Edge, based on the open source Chromium project, has also shown signs of supporting the technology. Apple and Mozilla have rejected at least the Topics API for interest-based ads on privacy grounds.
[…]
“The Privacy Sandbox technologies will offer sites and apps alternative ways to show you personalized ads while keeping your personal information more private and minimizing how much data is collected about you.”
These APIs include:
Topics: Locally track browsing history to generate ads based on demonstrated user interests without third-party cookies or identifiers that can track across websites.
Protected Audience (FLEDGE): Serve ads for remarketing (e.g. you visited a shoe website so we’ll show you a shoe ad elsewhere) while mitigating third-party tracking across websites.
Attribution Reporting: Data to link ad clicks or ad views to conversion events (e.g. sales).
Private Aggregation: Generate aggregate data reports using data from Protected Audience and cross-site data from Shared Storage.
Shared Storage: Allow unlimited, cross-site storage write access with privacy-preserving read access. In other words, you graciously provide local storage via Chrome for ad-related data or anti-abuse code.
Fenced Frames: Securely embed content onto a page without sharing cross-site data. Or iframes without the security and privacy risks.
These technologies, Google and industry allies believe, will allow the super-corporation to drop support for third-party cookies in Chrome next year without seeing a drop in targeted advertising revenue.
[…]
“Privacy Sandbox removes the ability of website owners, agencies and marketers to target and measure their campaigns using their own combination of technologies in favor of a Google-provided solution,” James Rosewell, co-founder of MOW, told The Register at the time.
[…]
Controversially, in the US, where lack of coherent privacy rules suit ad companies just fine, the popup merely informs the user that these APIs are now present and active in the browser but requires visiting Chrome’s Settings page to actually manage them – you have to opt-out, if you haven’t already. In the EU, as required by law, the notification is an invitation to opt-in to interest-based ads via Topics.
Using Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), the team of scientists behind the mission was able to record part of the Sun’s atmosphere at extreme ultraviolet wavelengths. The last-minute modification to the instrument involved adding a small, protruding “thumb” to block the bright light coming from the Sun such that the fainter light of its atmosphere could be made visible.
“It was really a hack,” Frédéric Auchère, an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Université Paris-Sud in France, and a member of the EUI team, said in a statement. “I had the idea to just do it and see if it would work. It is actually a very simple modification to the instrument.”
EUI produces high-resolution images of the structures in the Sun’s atmosphere. The team behind the instrument added a thumb to a safety door on EUI, which slides out of the way to let light into the camera so it can capture images of the Sun. If the door stops halfway, however, the thumb ends up shielding the bright light coming from the Sun’s disc in the center so that the fainter ultraviolet light coming from the corona (the outermost part of the atmosphere) can be visible.
A new way to view the Sun
The result is an ultraviolet image of the Sun’s corona. An ultraviolet image of the Sun’s disc has been superimposed in the middle, in the area left blank by the thumb hack, according to ESA.
The corona is usually hidden by the bright light of the Sun’s surface, and can mostly be seen during a total solar eclipse. The camera hack sort of mimics that same effect of the eclipse by blocking out the Sun’s light. The Sun’s corona has long baffled scientists as it is much hotter than the surface of the Sun with temperatures reaching 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1 million degrees Celsius), one of the greatest mysteries surrounding our host star.
“We’ve shown that this works so well that you can now consider a new type of instrument that can do both imaging of the Sun and the corona around it,” Daniel Müller, ESA’s Project Scientist for Solar Orbiter, said in a statement.
An anonymous reader shared this report from Bloomberg: China-linked hackers breached the corporate account of a Microsoft engineer and are suspected of using that access to steal a valuable key that enabled the hack of senior U.S. officials’ email accounts, the company said in a blog post. The hackers used the key to forge authentication tokens to access email accounts on Microsoft’s cloud servers, including those belonging to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Representative Don Bacon and State Department officials earlier this year.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Microsoft disclosed the breach in June, but it was still unclear at the time exactly how hackers were able to steal the key that allowed them to access the email accounts. Microsoft said the key had been improperly stored within a “crash dump,” which is data stored after a computer or application unexpectedly crashes…
The incident has brought fresh scrutiny to Microsoft’s cybersecurity practices.
Microsoft’s blog post says they corrected two conditions which allowed this to occur. First, “a race condition allowed the key to be present in the crash dump,” and second, “the key material’s presence in the crash dump was not detected by our systems.” We found that this crash dump, believed at the time not to contain key material, was subsequently moved from the isolated production network into our debugging environment on the internet connected corporate network. This is consistent with our standard debugging processes. Our credential scanning methods did not detect its presence (this issue has been corrected).
After April 2021, when the key was leaked to the corporate environment in the crash dump, the Storm-0558 actor was able to successfully compromise a Microsoft engineer’s corporate account. This account had access to the debugging environment containing the crash dump which incorrectly contained the key. Due to log retention policies, we don’t have logs with specific evidence of this exfiltration by this actor, but this was the most probable mechanism by which the actor acquired the key.
Twitter conversation with Philips Hue (source: 
