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DeathMonkey writes:

Russian hackers probed election systems in all 50 states, a new Senate report confirmed Thursday.

The report comes one day after former special counsel Robert Mueller told Congress that the Russian government is working to meddle in U.S. elections "as we sit here."

"It wasn't a single attempt," Mueller said Wednesday of Russia's 2016 election interference. "They're doing it as we sit here. And they expect to do it during the next campaign."

The bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee released Thursday confirmed previous comments by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that Russian hackers scanned election systems in all 50 states ahead of the 2016 presidential election. DHS initially acknowledged Russian attempts to hack into election systems in just 21 states.

Russia targeted all 50 states in 2016 election hacking campaign, Senate report confirms

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A major electricity supplier in South Africa's largest city [(Johannesburg)] has suffered a ransomware attack, leaving some residents without power. City Power revealed on Thursday that its IT systems had been shut down.

"It has encrypted all our databases, applications and network," the company tweeted, referring to the virus.

City Power's website remains offline and residents have reported problems via social media with their electricity supplies. The ransomware attack initially affected customers' ability to buy pre-paid electricity and also hampered the firm's efforts to respond to localised blackouts.

A spokesman for City Power told the BBC that more than a quarter of a million people might have been affected.

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CheesyMoo writes:

Two metres (6.6ft) long, the femur found at Angeac is thought to have belonged to a sauropod, a plant-eating dinosaur with a long neck and tail.

Sauropods, common in the late Jurassic era, were among the largest land animals that ever existed.

Palaeontologists say they are amazed at the state of preservation of the bone. [...] "We can see the insertions of muscles and tendons, and scars," Ronan Allain of the National History Museum of Paris told Le Parisien newspaper.

Link to the BBC article: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49129765

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inspected the demonstration of a "new-type tactical guided weapon" on Thursday as a warning to South Korea to stop importing high-tech weapons and conducting joint military exercises with the United States, state media KCNA said on Friday.

North Korea test-fired two new short-range ballistic missiles on Thursday, South Korean officials said, its first missile test since Kim and US President Donald Trump agreed to revive denuclearisation talks last month.

The KCNA report did not mention Trump or the US, but it said Kim criticised South Korean authorities for carrying on with joint exercises, which are usually conducted with US troops.

"We cannot but develop nonstop super-powerful weapon systems to remove the potential and direct threats to the security of our country that exist in the South," Kim said, according to KCNA.

He accused South Koreans of "double dealing" for saying they support peace but simultaneously importing new weapons and conducting military drills.

South Korea's leader should stop such "suicidal acts" and "should not make a mistake of ignoring the warning," Kim said.

Kim said he was satisfied with the rapid response and low-altitude trajectory of the weapon, which he said would make it difficult to intercept.

Seoul's National Security Council said on Thursday it believed the missiles were a new type of ballistic missile, but it would make a final assessment with the US.

Ballistic missile tests would be a violation of UN Security Council resolutions that ban North Korean use of such technology. North Korea rejects the restriction as an infringement of its right to self-defence.

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takyon writes:

SpaceX Falcon 9 booster nails landing in lead-up to next NASA-sponsored reuse milestone

SpaceX has nailed its 24th Falcon booster reuse and 44th Falcon booster landing with Falcon 9 B1056's flawless Landing Zone-1 recovery, setting the booster up to become the first SpaceX rocket NASA has flown on three times.

According to NASASpaceflight.com, NASA had already moved from a conservative "maybe" to a much firmer "yes, but..." on the second-reuse question, pending – of course – the successful completion of B1056's second launch and landing. As of now, the Block 5 booster has indeed successfully completed its second orbital-class mission, setting itself up for a milestone NASA reuse that could happen as early as December 2019 on CRS-19, Dragon 1's second-to-last planned International Space Station (ISS) resupply mission.

SpaceX's Starhopper nails first untethered flight as CEO Elon Musk teases next test

Starhopper has completed its first untethered flight ever, simultaneously a small step for the awkward prototype and a giant leap for SpaceX's Starship/Super Heavy program as the next-gen launch vehicle is carried into a new phase: flight testing.

Despite the spectacular and reportedly successful hover and divert test, Starhopper's powerful Raptor engine appears to have started a significant fire, placing SpaceX's Starhopper pad in a precarious position per the fire's apparent adjacency to full liquid oxygen tanks. Ironically, despite Starhopper's seeming predilection as of late towards catching itself on fire, the large rocket testbed appears to be entirely unscorched as a brush fire burns around a few hundred feet distant.

[...] According to Elon Musk, the SpaceX CEO will present an update on the company's progress designing, building, and testing Starship and Super Heavy soon after Starhopper's first successful flight, meaning it could potentially happen within the next week or two. Additionally, Musk deemed Starhopper's July 25th flight a success and indicated that SpaceX would attempt to put Starhopper through a more ambitious 200m (650 ft) hop in a week or two, continuing what is expected to be an increasingly arduous serious of tests for the prototype.

takyon writes:

To protect its satellites, France outlines ambitious space-weapons program

After French President Emmanuel Macron called for a space high command to protect his nation's satellites earlier this month, military officials on Thursday released their plans in more detail.

As reported in the French financial newspaper Les Echos, the French Defense Minister, Florence Parly, outlined a new space weapons program that would allow the country to move from space surveillance to the active protection of its satellites.

"France is not embarking on a space arms race," Parly said, according to the publication. However, the projects outlined Thursday by French officials include swarms of nano-satellites that would patrol a few kilometers around French satellites, a ground-based laser system to blind snooping satellites, and perhaps even machine guns on board some satellites.

Parly said one of the country's biggest challenges would be to develop these capabilities with about one-tenth of the budget that the US spends on civil and defense space activities.

Troupes de espace marine.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Sense and compute are the electronic eyes and ears that will be the ultimate power behind automating menial work and encouraging humans to cultivate their creativity.

These new capabilities for machines will depend on the best and brightest talent, and investors who are building and financing companies aiming to deliver the AI chips destined to be the neurons and synapses of robotic brains.

Like any other Herculean task, this one is expected to come with big rewards. And it will bring with it big promises, outrageous claims and suspect results. Right now, it's still the Wild West when it comes to measuring AI chips up against each other.

[...] A metric that gets thrown around frequently is TOPS, or trillions of operations per second, to measure performance. TOPS/W, or trillions of operations per second per Watt, is used to measure energy efficiency. These metrics are as ambiguous as they sound.

What are the operations being performed on? What's an operation? Under what circumstances are these operations being performed? How does the timing by which you schedule these operations impact the function you are trying to perform? Is your chip equipped with the expensive memory it needs to maintain performance when running "real-world" models? Phrased differently, do these chips actually deliver these performance numbers in the intended application?

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/19/powering-the-brains-of-tomorrows-intelligent-machines/

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Bytram writes in via IRC with two hot stories about the weather:

Records Tumble as Europe Swelters in Heatwave

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Records tumble as Europe swelters in heatwave

Belgium and the Netherlands have recorded their highest ever temperatures, in a heatwave searing Western Europe.

The Belgian town of Kleine Brogel in Limburg province hit 39.9C (102F), the hottest since records began in 1833.

A Eurostar train broke down in the extreme heat, trapping passengers.

The southern Dutch city of Eindhoven saw 39.3C, the highest temperature recorded since the Dutch royal meteorological institute began in 1901.

The highest temperature recorded in Paris - 40.4C in 1947 - is expected to be surpassed on Thursday.

Luxembourg is on red alert for the south and the capital - with top temperatures possibly climbing to 40C on Wednesday and even higher on Thursday.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

AutoX, the Hong Kong and San Jose, Calif.-based autonomous vehicle technology company, is pushing past its grocery delivery roots and into the AV supplier and robotaxi business.

And now, it's taking its business to Europe.

AutoX has partnered with NEVS — the Swedish holding company and electric vehicle manufacturer that bought Saab's assets out of bankruptcy — to deploy a robotaxi pilot service in Europe by the end of 2020. Under the exclusive partnership, AutoX will integrate its autonomous drive technology into a next-generation electric vehicle inspired by NEVS's "InMotion" concept that was shown at CES Asia in 2017.

[...] In June, AutoX became the second company to receive permission from California regulators to transport passengers in its robotaxis. AutoX is calling its California robotaxi service xTaxi.

[...] For now, the xTaxi pilot in California will be rather limited. It will operate in the same operational design domain as the delivery service in San Jose, an area of about five square miles. But the company clearly has ambitions to expand both in size and geographic reach. AutoX has more than 115 employees, and plans to hire more than 50 people this year.

The company is also working with San Jose city government to launch another pilot downtown. It has yet to reveal details, although the pilot could launch as early as next month.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/19/self-driving-startup-autox-expands-beyond-deliveries-and-sets-its-sights-on-europe/

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Team Telecom, a shadowy US national security unit tasked with protecting America's telecommunications systems, is delaying plans by Google, Facebook and other tech companies for the next generation of international fiber optic cables.

Team Telecom comprises representatives from the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice (including the FBI), who assess foreign investments in American telecom infrastructure, with a focus on cybersecurity and surveillance vulnerabilities.

Team Telecom works at a notoriously sluggish pace, taking over seven years to decide that letting China Mobile operate in the US would "raise substantial and serious national security and law enforcement risks," for instance. And while Team Telecom is working, applications are stalled at the FCC.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/18/how-us-national-security-agencies-hold-the-internet-hostage/

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Stock Trading Firm Robinhood Stored User Passwords in Plaintext

Robinhood, a California-based financial services company that provides a popular commission-free stock trading app, informed some users that their passwords were stored in plaintext.

"When you set a password for your Robinhood account, we use an industry-standard process that prevents anyone at our company from reading it. On Monday night, we discovered that some user credentials were stored in a readable format within our internal systems. We wanted to let you know that your Robinhood password may have been included," the company told impacted customers.

Robinhood says it has addressed the issue and claims to have found no evidence that the exposed passwords have been accessed by anyone outside its response team. However, "out of an abundance of caution," impacted users have been advised to change their passwords.

The company has not shared any technical details on the incident and it has refused to disclose the exact number of impacted users.

The financial services firm discovered the password issue on the same day it raised $323 million. The latest funding round valued the company at $7.6 billion.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours

Some models of Airbus A350 airliners still need to be hard rebooted after exactly 149 hours, despite warnings from the EU Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) first issued two years ago.

In a mandatory airworthiness directive (AD) reissued earlier this week, EASA urged operators to turn their A350s off and on again to prevent "partial or total loss of some avionics systems or functions".

The revised AD, effective from tomorrow (26 July), exempts only those new A350-941s which have had modified software pre-loaded on the production line. For all other A350-941s, operators need to completely power the airliner down before it reaches 149 hours of continuous power-on time.

Concerningly, the original 2017 AD was brought about by "in-service events where a loss of communication occurred between some avionics systems and avionics network" (sic). The impact of the failures ranged from "redundancy loss" to "complete loss on a specific function hosted on common remote data concentrator and core processing input/output modules".

In layman's English, this means that prior to 2017, at least some A350s flying passengers were suffering unexplained failures of potentially flight-critical digital systems.

Not a power of two. I wonder why 149 hours?

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"upstart" writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Moon bricks could keep the lights on and the heat up in Lunar colonies – TechCrunch

There may be no “dark side” of the Moon, but when and where it is dark, it’s dark — and stays that way for two weeks. If we’re going to have colonists up there, they’ll need to stay warm and keep the lights (among other things) on for the long lunar night. Turns out bricks made of Moon dust could be part of the solution.

Of course they will use the readily available solar power during the lunar day, and you might think that they could just charge up some batteries to last them through the night. But batteries are large and heavy — not the kind of thing you want to pack for a trip to the Moon.

How else could lunar colonies store energy? The European Space Agency partnered with Azimut Space to find out whether a sort of improvised geothermal energy solution would be feasible.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

The above image is a shot of Georgia Tech's latest robot posed next to a penny. The 3D-printed bot is roughly two millimeters in length — or about the size of the world's smallest ants, per the school. The tiny devices are designed to move using vibration from a variety of sources, ranging from ultrasound to more traditional speakers.

With the proper source, the bristles allow them to move four times their own size in roughly a second by moving the legs up and down. Different-sized legs react differently, responding to a variety of different frequencies. The actuators that generate the vibration are outside of the robot, however, as batteries small enough to be housed on their bodies simply don't exist.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/17/georgia-techs-ant-sized-micro-robots-move-through-vibration/

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

China launches first private rocket capable of carrying satellites

A Chinese startup successfully launched the country's first commercial rocket capable of carrying satellites into orbit Thursday, as the space race between China and the US heats up.

Beijing-based Interstellar Glory Space Technology—also known as iSpace—said it launched two satellites into orbit around 1:00 pm Beijing time (0500 GMT) from Jiuquan, a state launch facility in the Gobi desert.

The three-year-old company is one of dozens of Chinese rivals jostling for a slice of the global space industry, estimated to be worth about $1 trillion by 2040 according to Morgan Stanley.

The sector is currently dominated by SpaceX and Blue Origin in the US.

But Chinese startups are mostly focused on building technology to launch microsatellites instead of space tourism like their US counterparts, a spokeswoman for iSpace said.

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