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upstart writes:

But it's up to NASA to approve a rescue mission. Cue Aerosmith:

Momentus and Astroscale, two startups specializing in space infrastructure and orbital debris, want to collaborate and help boost NASA's aging Hubble Space Telescope into a safe orbit.

Hubble has far exceeded its original mission and expected run time, thanks to five space shuttle missions that sent astronauts to repair its instruments between 1993 and 2009.

NASA reckons there's more life in Hubble yet – but only if its altitude can be pushed higher to stop it falling and reentering Earth's atmosphere in the mid 2030s. Atmospheric drag has been slowly degrading the satellite's orbit, and it is expected to drop to 500 kilometers above Earth by about 2025.

In a bid to save the sinking telescope, NASA issued a Request for Information (RFI) in December to explore potential solutions from commercial vendors. NASA's not going to spend any money on this, but organizations willing to do the job would receive "technical information and technical consultation," from NASA Goddard.

Now Momentus and Astroscale have announced they're willing to collaborate on a potential future servicing mission to shift the Hubble Space Telescope into a safer orbit and remove any debris that could collide with the probe.

[...] "Leveraging Momentus's flight heritage with three orbital service vehicles on-orbit today and Astroscale's expertise in RPOD (rendezvous, proximity operations and docking), we found our product suites to be synergistic in support of a major NASA mission," said John Rood, Momentus CEO. "Even at 33, Hubble is fully capable of continuing its mission; where it is aging is in its orbital stability."

It's not known what other companies, if any, also responded to NASA's RFI, since the space agency promised to keep the information confidential. Last year, NASA agreed to study the technical feasibility of boosting Hubble with SpaceX's Dragon capsule, and began collecting data.

Neither that study nor the RFI guarantee that NASA will carry out a Hubble servicing mission, however. The space agency may well decide that, with newer tech in place and future exploration planned, Hubble's days are coming to an end.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/microsoft-patches-secure-boot-flaw-but-wont-enable-fix-by-default-until-early-2024/

Earlier this week, Microsoft released a patch to fix a Secure Boot bypass bug used by the BlackLotus bootkit we reported on in March. The original vulnerability, CVE-2022-21894, was patched in January, but the new patch for CVE-2023-24932 addresses another actively exploited workaround for systems running Windows 10 and 11 and Windows Server versions going back to Windows Server 2008.

The BlackLotus bootkit is the first-known real-world malware that can bypass Secure Boot protections, allowing for the execution of malicious code before your PC begins loading Windows and its many security protections. Secure Boot has been enabled by default for over a decade on most Windows PCs sold by companies like Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer, and others. PCs running Windows 11 must have it enabled to meet the software's system requirements.
[...]
Additionally, once the fixes have been enabled, your PC will no longer be able to boot from older bootable media that doesn't include the fixes. On the lengthy list of affected media: Windows install media like DVDs and USB drives created from Microsoft's ISO files; custom Windows install images maintained by IT departments; full system backups; network boot drives including those used by IT departments to troubleshoot machines and deploy new Windows images; stripped-down boot drives that use Windows PE; and the recovery media sold with OEM PCs.

I.E.: You will have to turn "Secure Boot" off in order to install Linux, probably.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Opinion: Most people are terrible at matching faces to photos, making polling checks unreliable:

On Thursday May 4, for the first time, members of the public voting in local council elections in England were required to bring photo ID to their polling station. Initial reports suggested that a few people were turned away because they didn't bring one of the approved forms of photo ID.

But even if they did bring the right documents, such as a driving license or passport, there's a question mark over whether the people manning polling stations could tell accurately whether the voter was the person pictured in the ID.

When you present your photo ID to be checked, the person looking at it has to decide if your face matches the picture in the document. In a lab, this is usually done with images and is called "face matching". Such studies typically present two face images side-by-side and ask people to judge whether the images show the same person or two different people.

While people perform well at this task when they are familiar with the person pictured, studies report the error rate can be as high as 35% when those pictured are unfamiliar. Even when people are asked to compare a live person standing in front of them with a photo, a recent study found they still got more than 20% of their answers wrong.

The people checking our photo ID are almost always unfamiliar with us, so we should expect that this is a difficult, error-prone task for them. And while you might think that people whose job it is to check photo ID would be better at it than the rest of us, cashiers, police officers and border control officers have all been shown to be as poor at face matching as untrained people.

The study of border control officers also showed they don't improve at the task as time goes on—there was no relationship between their performance and the number of years they had spent in the job.

upstart writes:

Elon Musk says he's found a new CEO for Twitter, a woman who will start in 6 weeks:

Elon Musk said Thursday he has found a new CEO for Twitter, or X Corp. as it's now called.

He did not name the person but she will be starting in about six weeks.

Musk, who bought Twitter last fall and has been running it since, has been insisting he is not the company's permanent CEO.

The Tesla billionaire said in a tweet Thursday that his role will transition to being Twitter's executive chairman and chief technology officer.

Musk has been saying for nearly six months that he plans to find a new CEO for San Francisco-based Twitter.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2020/07/inside-8086-processor-tiny-charge-pumps.html

Introduced in 1978, the revolutionary Intel 8086 microprocessor led to the x86 processors used in most desktop and server computing today. This chip is built from digital circuits, as you would expect. However, it also has analog circuits: charge pumps that turn the 8086's 5-volt supply into a negative voltage to improve performance.1 I've been reverse-engineering the 8086 from die photos, and in this post I discuss the construction of these charge pumps and how they work.

[...] An integrated circuit starts with a silicon substrate, and transistors are built on this. For high-performance integrated circuits, it is beneficial to apply a negative "bias" voltage to the substrate. 2 To obtain this substrate bias voltage, many chips in the 1970s had an external pin that was connected to -5V,3 but this additional power supply was inconvenient for the engineers using these chips. By the end of the 1970s, however, on-chip "charge pump" circuits were designed that generated the negative voltage internally. These chips used a single convenient +5V supply, making engineers happier.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

China's Spaceplane Conducted Multiple Maneuvers With a Mystery Object in Orbit:

The Chinese spaceplane finally returned to Earth earlier this week, but we're still learning more about its time in orbit. The spacecraft caught and released an unidentified object several times during its flight, performing a series of maneuvers that were captured by orbital radars, according to California-based LeoLabs. The company released its observational data, saying in a tweet that the data shows there were at least two capture and docking operations performed by the spacecraft.

The experimental launch vehicle took off from the Jiuquan Launch Center on August 5 as a classified payload on board a Long March 2F carrier rocket. This was the reusable spacecraft's second time to fly, with its first launch taking place in 2020. The spaceplane only stayed in orbit for four days during its inaugural flight but far outdid itself the second time around.

The spaceplane landed on May 8 after spending 276 days in orbit. The China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, a state-owned manufacturer that makes both civilian and military space launch vehicles, shared very little information about its craft. Observers of low Earth orbit, however, were able to track the spaceplane's activities during its lengthy flight.

In November 2022, the U.S. Space Force's 18th Space Defense Squadron tracked an object that may have been ejected from the spaceplane. The object remained unidentified, although some speculated it may have been a satellite used to track the spaceplane's performance in orbit.

That same object may be what LeoLabs tracked with its global network of radars. "Since its launch on 4 August 2022, we observed multiple large maneuvers raising the object's altitude — as well as repeated deployments, formation flying, and docking of a sub-satellite Object J (NORAD ID 54218)," the company said in its Twitter thread.

[...] China's experimental vehicle operates like a regular aircraft in Earth's atmosphere and a spacecraft in space, allowing it to complete missions in orbit and then return to Earth's surface, where it performs a horizontal landing. China isn't the only country testing this type of spacecraft; the U.S. Space Force has its own spaceplane. The Boeing X-37 launched in May 2020 for its sixth test flight and landed back on Earth in November 2022 after spending more than two years in orbit.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Hardware designer and manufacturer, SparkFun, has a short biography about computer engineer Ajay Bhatt who is widely recognized as one of the key inventors of the Universal Serial Bus (USB).

Once the design was finalized, Bhatt and his team worked with other technology companies to promote and standardize the USB. They formed a working group called the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) to develop the USB specification, which was first introduced in 1996.

The USB specification quickly gained widespread adoption in the technology industry due to its convenience and versatility, and new versions of the standard were introduced over the years to improve data transfer speeds, power management, and other features. Today, the USB is used in a wide range of devices, and it continues to evolve and improve with each new iteration.

When Intel initially developed the USB, it held the patents for the technology, which allowed the company to control the standard and charge licensing fees for its use. However, Intel soon realized that its proprietary approach was not in the best interests of the industry or consumers. The company recognized that the success of the USB depended on its widespread adoption and interoperability with different devices, which would not be possible if licensing fees were required for every use.

In response, Intel took a bold step and transferred ownership of the USB specifications to a non-profit organization called the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF). The USB-IF is a group of companies that work together to promote and develop the USB standard, with the goal of ensuring that the standard remains open and accessible to all.

Intel's decision to transfer ownership of the USB specifications to the USB-IF was a pivotal moment in the development of the USB standard. It helped to ensure that the USB became a truly universal and open interface, which has had a profound impact on the computer industry and consumers around the world. Today, the USB is used in a wide range of devices, from computers and smartphones to home appliances and automotive systems, and it continues to evolve and improve to meet the needs of an ever-changing technological landscape.

Previously:
(2022) Henn Tan and the Invention of the USB Thumb Drive in Singapore
(2022) Linux Fu: Eavesdropping On Serial

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The incident could be related to the ongoing Eta Aquariids meteor shower:

A metallic oblong-shaped rock may have made its way from space all the way to the surface of Earth, traveling hundreds of millions of miles only to land in New Jersey.

The object fell through the roof of a home in Hopewell Township, New Jersey on Monday just after 1:00 p.m. ET, CNBC first reported. Although it remains unidentified, it's suspected that the small rock may in fact be a meteorite that formed billions of years ago.

"We are thinking it's a meteorite, came through here, hit the floor here because that's completely damaged, it ricocheted up to this part of the ceiling and then finally rested on the floor there," Suzy Kop, the daughter of the family that owns the house, told CNBC. The residents were not home at the time, and there were no reported injuries.

[...] Investigations are still ongoing regarding the origin of the flying object, but authorities suspect that it could be related to the ongoing Eta Aquarid meteor shower, which is active between April 15 and May 27. The meteor shower originates from Halley's comet, named after English astronomer Edmond Halley who plotted its orbit in the 17th century.

Thousand of meteorites fall to the surface of Earth each year, but rarely do they ever fall inside people's homes, which makes the latest incident a cosmic treat—especially knowing no one was hurt.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Images from NASA's Perseverance may show record of wild Martian river:

New images taken by NASA's Perseverance rover may show signs of what was once a rollicking river on Mars, one that was deeper and faster-moving than scientists have ever seen evidence for in the past. The river was part of a network of waterways that flowed into Jezero Crater, the area the rover has been exploring since landing more than two years ago.

Understanding these watery environments could help scientists in their efforts to seek out signs of ancient microbial life that may have been preserved in Martian rock.

Perseverance is exploring the top of a fan-shaped pile of sedimentary rock that stands 820 feet (250 meters) tall and features curving layers suggestive of flowing water. One question scientists want to answer is whether that water flowed in relatively shallow streams—closer to what NASA's Curiosity rover has found evidence of in Gale Crater—or a more powerful river system.

Stitched together from hundreds of images captured by Perseverance's Mastcam-Z instrument, two new mosaics suggest the latter, revealing important clues: coarse sediment grains and cobbles.

"Those indicate a high-energy river that's truckin' and carrying a lot of debris. The more powerful the flow of water, the more easily it's able to move larger pieces of material," said Libby Ives, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which operates the Perseverance rover. With a background in studying Earth-based rivers, Ives has spent the last six months analyzing images of the Red Planet's surface. "It's been a delight to look at rocks on another planet and see processes that are so familiar," Ives said. Following the curves

[...] "What's exciting here is we've entered a new phase of Jezero's history. And it's the first time we're seeing environments like this on Mars," said Perseverance's deputy project scientist, Katie Stack Morgan of JPL. "We're thinking about rivers on a different scale than we have before."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mitochondrial donation treatment aims to prevent children from inheriting incurable diseases:

The first UK baby created with DNA from three people has been born after doctors performed a groundbreaking IVF procedure that aims to prevent children from inheriting incurable diseases.

The technique, known as mitochondrial donation treatment (MDT), uses tissue from the eggs of healthy female donors to create IVF embryos that are free from harmful mutations their mothers carry and are likely to pass on to their children.

Because the embryos combine sperm and egg from the biological parents with tiny battery-like structures called mitochondria from the donor's egg, the resulting baby has DNA from the mother and father as usual, plus a small amount of genetic material – about 37 genes – from the donor.

The process has led to the phrase "three-parent babies", though more than 99.8% of the DNA in the babies comes from the mother and father.

Research on MDT, which is also known as mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), was pioneered in the UK by doctors at the Newcastle Fertility Centre. The work aimed to help women with mutated mitochondria to have babies without the risk of passing on genetic disorders. People inherit all their mitochondria from their mother, so harmful mutations in the "batteries" can affect all of the children a woman has.

[...] The Newcastle process has several steps. First, sperm from the father is used to fertilise eggs from the affected mother and a healthy female donor. The nuclear genetic material from the donor's egg is then removed and replaced with that from the couple's fertilised egg. The resulting egg has a full set of chromosomes from both parents, but carries the donor's healthy mitochondria instead of the mother's faulty ones. This is then implanted in the womb.

Vast Says It Will Launch its First Space Station in 2025 on a Falcon 9

upstart writes:

"We have a clear path for how we're going to get there":

A private space station company, Vast, announced on Wednesday that it intends to launch a commercial space station as soon as August 2025. After deploying this "Haven-1" space station in low-Earth orbit, four commercial astronauts will launch to the facility on board SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle.

The California-based company says this crew will then spend about 30 days on board the Haven-1 space station before returning to Earth. As part of Wednesday's announcement, Vast said those four crewed seats are now up for sale, as are those for a second mission that will launch no earlier than 2026.

"It's a super aggressive schedule," Jed McCaleb, the founder of Vast, said in an interview with Ars. "But we have a clear path for how we're going to get there."

[...] The partnership with SpaceX is the key to making this mission happen. Not only will the 3.8-meter-wide Haven-1 module launch inside a Falcon 9 rocket, but part of its life-support systems will also be provided by the Crew Dragon spacecraft when the vehicle is docked.

The Dragon spacecraft will remain powered on the entire time it is attached to Haven-1, providing some of the consumables such as air or water and other services needed to keep humans alive. By leaning on SpaceX and its experience developing these life support systems for Dragon, Vast will attempt to develop a space station on a quicker timeline.

[...] "A commercial rocket launching a commercial spacecraft with commercial astronauts to a commercial space station is the future of low-Earth orbit, and with Vast, we're taking another step toward making that future a reality," said Tom Ochinero, senior vice president of commercial business at SpaceX, in a statement. "The SpaceX team couldn't be more excited to launch Vast's Haven-1 and support their follow-on human spaceflight missions to the orbiting commercial space station."

upstart writes:

The work is a step toward crash-proof quantum computers:

In 1997, Alexei Kitaev, a theorist at the California Institute of Technology, pointed out that such quasiparticles could lay the perfect foundation for quantum computers. Physicists have long salivated at the possibility of harnessing the quantum world to perform calculations beyond the reach of typical computers and their binary bits. But qubits, the atomlike building blocks of quantum computers, are fragile. Their wave functions collapse at the lightest touch, erasing their memories and their ability to perform quantum calculations. This flimsiness has complicated ambitions to control qubits long enough for them to finish lengthy calculations.

Kitaev realized that the shared memory of non-abelian anyons could serve as an ideal qubit. For starters, it was malleable. You could change the state of the qubit — flipping a zero to a one — by exchanging the positions of the anyons in a manner known as "braiding."

You could also read out the state of the qubit. When the simplest non-abelian anyons are brought together and "fused," for instance, they will emit another quasiparticle only if they have been braided. This quasiparticle serves as a physical record of their crisscrossed journey through space and time.

And crucially, the memory is also nigh incorruptible. As long as the anyons are kept far apart, poking at any individual particle won't change the state the pair is in — whether zero or one. In this way, their collective memory is effectively cut off from the cacophony of the universe.

"This would be the perfect place to hide information," said Maissam Barkeshli, a condensed matter theorist at the University of Maryland.

Kitaev's proposal came to be known as "topological" quantum computing because it relied on the topology of the braids. The term refers to broad features of the braid — for example, the number of turns — that aren't affected by any specific deformation of their path. Most researchers now believe that braids are the future of quantum computing, in one form or another. Microsoft, for instance, has researchers trying to persuade electrons to form non-abelian anyons directly. Already, the company has invested millions of dollars into building tiny wires that — at sufficiently frigid temperatures — should host the simplest species of braidable quasiparticles at their tips. The expectation is that at these low temperatures, electrons will naturally gather to form anyons, which in turn can be braided into reliable qubits.

How one of Vladimir Putin's most prized hacking units got pwned by the FBI

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/how-the-fbi-pwned-turla-a-kremlin-jewel-and-one-of-worlds-most-skilled-apts/

FBI officials on Tuesday dropped a major bombshell: After spending years monitoring exceptionally stealthy malware that one of the Kremlin's most advanced hacker units had installed on hundreds of computers around the world, agents unloaded a payload that caused the malware to disable itself.

The counter hack took aim at Snake, the name of a sprawling piece of cross-platform malware that for more than two decades has been in use for espionage and sabotage. Snake is developed and operated by Turla, one of the world's most sophisticated APTs, short for advanced persistent threats, a term for long-running hacking outfits sponsored by nation states.

If nation-sponsored hacking was baseball, then Turla would not just be a Major League team—it would be a perennial playoff contender. Researchers from multiple security firms largely agree that Turla was behind breaches of the US Department of Defense in 2008, and more recently the German Foreign Office and France's military. The group has also been known for unleashing stealthy Linux malware and using satellite-based Internet links to maintain the stealth of its operations.

One of the most powerful tools in Turla's arsenal is Snake, a digital Swiss Army knife of sorts that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Written in the C programming language, Snake comes as a highly modular series of pieces that are built on top of a massive peer-to-peer network that covertly links one infected computer with another. Snake, the FBI said, has to date spread to more than 50 countries and infected computers belonging to NATO member governments, a US journalist who has covered Russia, and sectors involving critical infrastructure, communications, and education.

A short list of Snake capabilities includes a backdoor that allows Turla to install or uninstall malware on infected computers, send commands, and exfiltrate data of interest to the Kremlin.
[...]
The court documents provide an intriguing but ultimately incomplete account of how the counterhack against Turla worked. A joint cybersecurity advisory issued by law enforcement agencies around the world provided a few additional details.

upstart writes:

With no easy way to revoke compromised keys, MSI, and its customers, are in a real pickle:

A ransomware intrusion on hardware manufacturer Micro-Star International, better known as MSI, is stoking concerns of devastating supply chain attacks that could inject malicious updates that have been signed with company signing keys that are trusted by a huge base of end-user devices, a researcher said.

"​​It's kind of like a doomsday scenario where it's very hard to update the devices simultaneously, and they stay for a while not up to date and will use the old key for authentication," Alex Matrosov, CEO, head of research and founder of security firm Binarly, said in an interview. "It's very hard to solve, and I don't think MSI has any backup solution to actually block the leaked keys."

The intrusion came to light in April when, as first reported by Bleeping Computer, the extortion portal of the Money Message ransomware group listed MSI as a new victim and published screenshots purporting to show folders containing private encryption keys, source code, and other data. A day later, MSI issued a terse advisory saying that it had "suffered a cyberattack on part of its information systems." The advisory urged customers to get updates from the MSI website only. It made no mention of leaked keys.

Since then, Matrosov has analyzed data that was released on the Money Message site on the dark web. To his alarm, included in the trove were two private encryption keys. The first is the signing key that digitally signs MSI firmware updates to cryptographically prove that they are legitimate ones from MSI rather than a malicious impostor from a threat actor.

This raises the possibility that the leaked key could push out updates that would infect a computer's most nether regions without triggering a warning. To make matters worse, Matrosov said, MSI doesn't have an automated patching process the way Dell, HP, and many larger hardware makers do. Consequently, MSI doesn't provide the same kind of key revocation capabilities.

upstart writes:

An experiment that could become permanent:

YouTube's annoying ads often push those who don't want to pay $120 for YouTube Premium to use ad blockers. But Google isn't happy about this potentially lost revenue, and has decided to experiment with a feature that urges ad-blocker users to think again.

Redditor Sazk100 posted a screenshot earlier this week showing a YouTube popup warning that ad blockers are not allowed on the platform. It notes that ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide, and that an ad-free experience is available via the paid-for YouTube Premium. The message finishes with two options: Allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium, which is $11.99 per month or $119.99 per year for access to original programs and no ads.

Some users who've seen it say they have been able to simply close the pop-up and continue blocking ads on YouTube, but it's likely that Google will clamp down on this, or make the pop-up appear regularly enough to be a distraction.

The moderators of the YouTube subreddit wrote that an employee had confirmed the ad-blocker message was an experiment by YouTube. A Google spokesperson expanded on this in a statement to IGN.

"We're running a small experiment globally that urges viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium," they said. "Ad blocker detection is not new, and other publishers regularly ask viewers to disable ad blockers."

While most online companies make their revenue from ads, some complain that YouTube has gone too far, citing its increasing number of unskippable and extended mid-roll ads.

Original Submission